Nik Bartsch's Ronin

Stoa (ECM)

Editorial Review

By Michael Tucker

With this issue of Swiss pianist Nik Bärtch’s coolly propulsive yet dynamically arresting Stoa, ECM edges closer to its one-thousandth release: an astonishing achievement for what is still a relatively small and independent outfit. More important than any such statistic, of course, is the surpassing quality of the music which Manfred Eicher’s Munich-based company continues to offer--a quality which runs right through what must surely be the widest range of music ever recorded by one producer. Stoa is an excellent case in point. Like the heavy trip-hop rhythms which a decade or so ago drove Norwegian trumpeter Nils Petter Molvaer’s Khmer, the hypnotic, minimalist-like layers and tightly interlaced, circular grooves of the trance-inducing Stoa should appeal to a wide constituency. Bärtch--whose strongly ostinato, yet space-conscious pianism is complemented by an all-Swiss quartet of Sha (clarinets), Björn Meyer (bass), Kaspar Rast (drums) and Andi Pupato (percussion)--calls his music Zen funk, and his band Ronin, after the freelance warriors of Akira Kurosawa’s classic film Ran. You can sense something of Bärtch’s early jazz background here, as well as an affinity for music as distinctive as that of James Brown and Steve Reich. But the jazz elements have been tempered to fit a much more through-composed feeling than usually obtains with such music, while the stimulus of such seeming opposites as Brown and Reich has resulted in a music which--like so many ECM releases--is virtually beyond category. Body and mind come together in an intriguing, rhythmically compelling yet contemplative confluence of sensibilities. Part Zen poetry, part club-culture groove, the near-hour of the ultra-disciplined, East-West synthesis of intelligence and passion that is Stoa could just take the world by storm.