Om – With Dom Um Romao (2019)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 41:54 minutes | 898 MB | Genre: Jazz
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © ECM

To us, this recording represents what was great about ECM in the mid 70s, searching improvised grooves that cross the lines between free playing, textural tone bending, ethnic influences and modern fusion, but without getting too new-agey. Om were a quartet of European improvisers, many of whom would go on to delve more fully into the free scene there: Urs Leimgruber, Christy Doran, Bobby Burri and Fredy Studer, and Dom Um Romao adds some great percussive touches to this recording as a guest. The set starts out with Um Romao laying out some expressive percussion before settling into the nice modal groove of “Chipero”, which is followed by the more energetic “Dumini”, a spacious classic ECM number “Back To Front” and the lengthy fusion excursion “De Funk”.

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Om – Rautionaha (2019)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 47:03 minutes | 970 MB | Genre: Jazz
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © ECM

The Swiss quartet of OM, which found just the freedom it needed in ECM’s studios for a good decade, flung open the doors with colorful aplomb on Rautionaha, a rare JAPO release. To this early date the group brings a kaleidoscope of shared experience. The sound is appropriately splintered. Guitarist Christy Doran pens the kick-in-the-gut opener, “For Ursi.” Unable to resist the attraction from the get-go, saxophonist Urs Leimgruber colors the twilight with his heady tenor, chaining ladders of virtuosity with attentive form. His gurgling expositions of momentary abandon give Doran just the break he needs to cast a reverberant magic with tails flying. The superb rhythm work from percussionist Fredy Studer and bassist Bobby Burri completes this wall of light. The latter gives us “Stephanie,” his first of two cuts. This meditation of gongs and electronics coalesces into some fine soliloquies from the composer, while the full drumming and six-string picking shimmer like morning sun on the horizon’s lip. The prickly tenor is a bonus. Speaking of which, Leimgruber puts his writing to the test in “Song For My Lady.” Something of a ballad, in it he becomes a crying wayfarer who walks the same circle of self-reflection until there is only music left of the one that produced it. Lifting this ponderous weight off our shoulders is Burri’s title offering, which grows like weed in a groovy embrace. His bass work glows here. Leimgruber opts for soprano, reaching heights of multi-phonic brilliance that no footstool can reach. The effect is nothing short of extraordinary. The quartet ends on a whimsical punctuation mark: a flag without a country, a star without a sky. In the absence of definite shape, we are free to induce our own.

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Om – Kirikuki (1976/2019)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 40:34 minutes | 834 MB | Genre: Jazz
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © ECM

Like its contemporary, the Everyman Band, the Lucerne-based quartet known as OM succeeded in blending rock and free improv idioms to gnarled perfection. Composed of guitarist Christy Doran (Dublin-born but Swiss-raised) and fellow countrymen Urs Leimgruber (reeds), Bobby Burri (bass), and Fredy Studer (drums), the group was an espresso shot in all four careers. ECM has, of course, given just dues with a 2006 retrospective. Still, there’s no better place to get acquainted with OM than through the four complete albums for sister label JAPO, of which this is the first (the fourth, Cerberus, survives fully intact on said retrospective).

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