Winter Songs

For Winter Songs, Steve Swallow’s first true leader date in over a decade (Into The Woodworks, 2013) and his first recorded appearance on the label after John Scofield’s Swallow Tales and Carla Bley’s Life Goes On in 2020, the master-bassist has gathered together a group of close confidants to accompany him through some of the most intrinsic and melodically immediate music he has ever written. Swallow explains, “before Winter Songs I had given music whatever I could, but as I made this album the tables turned: it gave me what I needed. Music is elemental, like the air we breathe…” With the expert but subtly applied horn section of Chris Cheek on sax and Mike Rodriguez on trumpet, Adam Nussbaum on drums keeping the time flexible and the tasteful harmonic outlining of guitarist Steve Cardenas and Gil Goldstein on piano, the nine collected originals that make up Winter Songs act more as conveyors of patient reflection and calm than they do as inciters of turbulent improvisation. Swallow’s description of how this music came to be is perceptible in sound: this music is not performed as a means to an end, but has become an end in itself. Fluid swing, thoughtful balladry and a chamber-music-like sense of space and interplay are in full bloom here.