Chris Potter, one of jazz’s most powerful jazz reeds-players, has always seemed like the ideal sideman, perhaps better suited to enhancing the stories of others than to generating his own. But there’s a new creative tension within the quartet for his third ECM album as leader, perhaps because there seem to be two key partnerships complementing and challenging each other within it: Potter’s with longtime bass sidekick Joe Martin, and Cuban-American pianist David Virelles’ edgier, contemporary one with drummer Marcus Gilmore. Potter’s tenor sax has a deep, Coltrane-style intensity and a violin-like shimmer on the smoky Heart in Hand; the thumb-piano melody to Llimba sets an African mood that develops a Latin feel under a busy tenor theme; and the title track is a standout, with its ardent, songlike theme for bass clarinet. But Virelles’ solo on the Indian rhythms of Yasodhara – a tapestry of spidery wanderings, long pauses and Cecil Tayloresque bursts, with Gilmore right on his heels – is possibly the session’s most breathtaking improvisation.
