Résumé Eberhard Weber

• 1 Liezen 02:45
• 2 Karlsruhe 02:25
• 3 Heidenheim 05:42
• 4 Santiago 03:53
• 5 Wolfsburg 03:27
• 6 Amsterdam 04:20
• 7 Marburg 04:08
• 8 Tübingen 04:04
• 9 Bochum 02:51
• 10 Bath 04:33
• 11 Lazise 04:09
• 12 Grenoble 05:01
• Total Runtime 47:18

Info for Résumé

“Résumé” is a ‘live album’ with a difference. The twelve concert recordings include here, made at locations from Amsterdam to Santiago, provide the source material from which Eberhard Weber has sculpted something new. The innovative bassist played more than a thousand concerts while a member of the Jan Garbarek Group, and each of them included an extended feature for him alone, characteristically transcending jazz definitions of the bass solo. For “Résumé”, he has returned to recordings of these solo sequences and reworked them into a unique album with its own sense of flow.

Originally the unaccompanied solos had a double function. As Weber recalls in his liner notes, “they were conceived as transitions to join two compositional blocks of various keys, colours and tempi as the group’s programme progressed. They were also intended to add another colour to the multifarious ones in the programme – a personal one, as it were: my own. The plan was to be inventive after leaving the key of the initial piece, to lead into the next one after an extended number of minutes enriched by my own ideas...” For the needs of “Résumé”, the pragmatic ‘transitional’ elements were eliminated, replaced by “aphorisms, small surprises and colours with the addition of other instruments.”

There are guest appearances by two old friends. We hear Jan Garbarek then and now, playing selje overtone flute on “Bath” back in the day and adding contemporary saxophone overdubs to “Amsterdam” and “Bochum” (all tunes being named after respective original recording locations). Michael DiPasqua (who previously partnered Weber in an early 80s Garbarek Group - see “Wayfarer” and “It’s OK To Listen To The Gray Voice” – and played on Eberhard’s own projects including “Later That Evening” and “Endless Days”) contributes drums and percussion to “Bochum” and “Lazise”. Mostly, however, we hear the unmistakable sound of Weber’s customized electrobass:

“Those who have been following my activities over the years are aware that I used a delay, an echo device, to obtain a larger colour palette for the solo bass playing. I used the “reverb unit” to record my bass live, to reproduce it, to create my own spontaneous playback, so to speak, over which I could play solo improvisations. Those playback loops could not be stored in my effects device; thus they applied for one spontaneous solo, at one concert, for those few minutes.”

“My special instrument, a five-string electric double bass, is capable of striking sonic effects, which happily can be further enriched by such additional reduplication; that was the only way I could successfully sustain long solo recitals. I am not concerned about whether what I originally played is still recognisable – using the delay effect already produced astonishing overlays per se. Now, after completing the individual solo excerpts, not even I can always spontaneously hear what I originally played and what I added later on. Wracking my brain about which (jazz) pigeonhole fits this type of music-making has always been an alien concept to me.”

Based on live recordings made between 1990 and 2007, “Résumé” was mixed at Studios La Buissonne in the South of France by Weber, Manfred Eicher, Michael DiPasqua and Gérard de Haro in 2011.

Eberhard Weber, electric double bass & keyboards
Jan Garbarek, tenor & oprano saxophones
Michael DiPasqua, drums & percussion

Live recordings 1990 – 2007
Engineers: Walter Speckmann and Gert Rickmann-Wunderlich
Mixed at Studios La Buissonne by Gérard de Haro, Eberhard Weber, Michael DiPasqua and Manfred Eicher
Mastering: Nicolas Baillard
Album produced by Manfred Eicher

Eberhard Weber
was born in 1940 in Stuttgart, Germany. The son of a music teacher, Weber received a classical training, which influenced his later attitude to composition and musical structure.

Paul Olson (allaboutjazz.com) called Weber’s ECM debut album The Colours of Chloë (1973) “a near-perfect album” by “an artist whose creative vision seemed completely mature”. It is often cited as an early instance of “European chamber jazz” and thus of an “emancipation” from a US mainstream. Nevertheless, American musicians were intrigued by Weber’s work and especially his expressive use of customized five-string electric upright bass, his instrument of choice since 1974. In his first decade with ECM, Weber played with Gary Burton’s band as well as guitarists Pat Metheny and Mick Goodrick (Ring, 1974, and Passengers, 1976); the association with the great vibraphonist was revived in 2005 on Stages of a Long Journey. Weber also played with Ralph Towner (Solstice, 1974, and Sound and Shadows, 1977) and on Metheny’s Watercolors (1977).

His popular band, Colours showcased saxophonist Charlie Mariano (Yellow Fields, 1975, Silent Feet, 1977, Little Movements, 1980). Guitarist Bill Frisell, pianist Lyle Mays and oboist Paul McCandless have also made contributions to Weber discs. From 1978, Weber made his work with Jan Garbarek a priority; “we have an ideal musical sensitivity together”, Weber has said. He toured the globe with nine incarnations of the Garbarek Group and appeared on a dozen albums with the Norwegian saxophonist.

In 2007 Weber suffered a severe stroke which put an end to his playing career, though not his musical activities. Weber's most recent albums, Résumé (2012) and Encore (2015) cleverly deploy recorded solos from his performances with the Garbarek Group, overdubbed with keyboards/treatments by Weber, and contributions from Garbarek (saxophones, flute), Ack Van Rooyen (flugelhorn) and Michael DiPasqua (percussion). Hommage à Eberhard Weber (2015) brings together an all-star line-up of Weber’s friends and collaborators in a unique programme of Weber compositions, incorporating taped material and an extended homage by Pat Metheny. In his liner notes, the guitarist writes of his sense of Weber from the first being “an individual who had a visionary sense of what music could be, totally of his own design”.

Booklet for Résumé