Gary Burton & Chick Corea - Crystal Silence (1980 Japanese ECM Vinyl LP)

Gary Burton & Chick Corea - Crystal Silence | Vinyl LP - 1980 Japanese ECM Reissue (PAP-9247, Trio Kenwood Corporation)

Corea and Burton met properly at a 1972 festival in Munich, thrown together at a late-night session where they turned out to be the only two players left. Piano and vibraphone are both chordal instruments, and the pair had circled each other before without quite finding the fit. This time it clicked straight away, and Manfred Eicher heard enough to book studio time. They cut the whole album in one day, 6 November 1972, at the Arne Bendiksen Studio in Oslo, with Jan Erik Kongshaug at the desk. The result is chamber jazz in the truest sense: two instruments, no rhythm section, everything resting on how closely the two listen to each other. Corea supplies five originals, among them the sprinting Señor Mouse and the hushed title track. Steve Swallow contributes three tunes and Mike Gibbs one. Nobody expected much of it. It went on to become one of ECM's best-loved records.

This is the Japanese pressing Trio put out in 1980. Trio Records, part of Trio Kenwood Corporation, handled ECM's catalogue in Japan through the seventies and eighties, and copies from this period are well regarded for their pressing quality. That matters on a record this intimate. Crystal Silence lives in its soft passages, the long decay of Burton's mallets and the space Corea leaves around a phrase, and a clean, quiet pressing lets all of it through. This copy carries the OBI strip and the printed insert with Japanese notes and an ECM discography, both of which tend to go missing over forty-odd years. The music is the same session that runs as the original ECM 1024, mastered and pressed in Japan. This is the 1980 Japanese pressing on Trio Records, catalogue PAP-9247, OBI and insert intact.