Steve Kuhn - Trance (1984 Japanese ECM Vinyl LP)

Steve Kuhn - Trance | Vinyl LP - 1984 Japanese ECM pressing (25MJ 3347, Polydor K.K.)

Steve Kuhn holds a small, strange place in jazz history: in 1960 he was the first pianist in John Coltrane's quartet, playing the Jazz Gallery for about eight weeks before Coltrane replaced him with McCoy Tyner. He went on to a long career with Stan Getz, Kenny Dorham and Art Farmer, and it was his lyrical, harmonically rich writing that caught the ear of Manfred Eicher. Trance, cut over two days in November 1974, was Kuhn's debut for ECM and the first record he built entirely from his own compositions. He plays acoustic and electric piano, joined by Steve Swallow on electric bass, Jack DeJohnette on drums and Sue Evans on percussion. The music is classic mid-seventies ECM: open, lyrical and unhurried on the title track, Latin-inflected on "Something Everywhere", with Swallow's bass guitar threading through it all. It even ends with Kuhn reciting a strange, echoing spoken piece on "Life's Backward Glance".

Trance has become one of the quietly treasured records in the ECM catalogue, the sort of album collectors pass along in a lowered voice as a lost classic. It launched a run of strong Kuhn albums for the label through the seventies, and the rapport here with Swallow and DeJohnette, two of the most responsive players around, is a large part of why it holds up. For years it was hard to find on vinyl outside the Japanese pressings, which is part of why those pressings are so sought after now. This is one of them, the 1984 Japanese edition on ECM, manufactured by Polydor K.K. as part of its ECM Collection series and mixed, like the original, by the label's Jan Erik Kongshaug.