White Night

The ‘white night’ of this album's title comes from an anonymous Japanese poem about a cuckoo that sings all the white, moonlit, night. This is, I'm told, an Oriental Japanese cuckoo, which sings rather more interestingly than a European one. But as ever with Stephan Micus' music this is about a journey rather than an evocation of anything. Micus usually picks a cast of instruments that he has collected or commissioned for each release (this is his 23rd for ECM). Here it is African kalimbas (thumb pianos) from Tanzania, Botswana, Namibia and Ethiopia and Armenian duduks that dominate – instruments that rarely play together.

There's a kind of symmetry about the album. It opens with ‘The Eastern Gate’ and closes with ‘The Western Gate’ and you visit various locations in between. These tracks feel grand and ceremonial, thanks to a bass duduk that goes lower than any you will have heard before. Four of the ten tracks include vocals, often multi-tracked, while ‘The Moon’ is solo duduk and ‘All the Way’ is a wonderfully complex kalimba solo that sounds like several instruments. It's a unique and well-structured journey from which you emerge refreshed.