David Friesen - Waterfall Rainbow (1977 Japanese Inner City Vinyl LP)

David Friesen - Waterfall Rainbow | Vinyl LP - 1977 Japanese Inner City (SFX-10733, Nippon Phonogram)

Waterfall Rainbow is the record where David Friesen widened his canvas. His breakthrough, Star Dance, had been an intimate duo with the guitarist John Stowell, but here, in 1977, the Portland bassist opens the music out into a full ensemble and lands somewhere very close to the ECM sound of the period. The company tells the story: Ralph Towner on classical and twelve-string guitar and Paul McCandless on oboe, English horn and bass clarinet, both from the group Oregon, whose blend of jazz, folk and chamber music this album shares. Friesen's acoustic bass sits at the centre, singing rather than merely keeping time, and his compositions have the pastoral, devotional quality their titles suggest, "Spring Wind", "The Peace That Passes Understanding" and "Dancing Spirits Before The Lord". John Stowell adds electric guitar, Bob Moses is on drums, and the whole thing floats and glows rather than swings hard. It is lyrical, atmospheric music, the kind of acoustic chamber jazz that a certain kind of listener finds deeply calming.

Friesen has gone on to a long and prolific career, recording dozens of albums as a leader and staying true to the melodic, spiritual approach he set out here. Waterfall Rainbow belongs to the fertile late-seventies moment when the ECM aesthetic, all space, tone and restraint, was drawing players on both sides of the Atlantic, and it holds up as a lovely example of the American end of that sound.

This copy is the 1977 Japanese pressing on Inner City, manufactured by Nippon Phonogram, catalogue number SFX-10733.