ECM Special V: New Music in Percussion

Percussion, in the ECM imagination, rarely behaves as ornament or engine alone. On ECM Special V: New Music in Percussion, rhythm functions as a conduit for revelation, each struck surface opening into an interior geography where hands and skins communicate in infinity signs. The compilation gathers music that feels carved from threshold states, hovering between human gesture and some older grammar of vibration. Its deepest theme may be contact: the instant when one body addresses another through resonance and receives, in return, a message immediately felt in the beat of the moment. “Scimitar” is the first of two selections from gone-too-soon multi-instrumentalist Colin Walcott’s Cloud Dance, and it opens this world with a blade of astonishing finesse. Walcott’s tabla and John Abercrombie’s electric guitar do not merely accompany one another, nor do they settle into polite dialogue. They graze and refract, skating across modal waters with fiery verses on their tongues. The title…