With an inestimable career largely spent in the service of interpreting the material of others, it's easy to forget pianist Steve Kuhn's equally valuable contributions as a composer. That he's turned almost exclusively to the venerable ECM label when either the spirit moves him to focus once again on his own writing, or when the label's head and primary producer Manfred Eicher feels it's time that the pianist consider doing so, the result has been a small but significant discography.

This began with the 1974 solo album, Ecstasy—recorded at Eicher's suggestion a day after the session that resulted in the 1975 group record Trance, reissued on CD by ECM in 2005. Kuhn has since released six more discs on ECM over the next three decades, the most recent being Promises Kept (2004), a rare meeting of jazz and strings that avoided all tendencies towards the saccharine while, at the same time, remaining deeply beautiful.

With only three of Kuhn's eight discs available on CD (four counting the limited edition Japanese release of Ecstasy), Life's Backward Glances - Solo and Quartet begins to right a major wrong by making Ecstasy, 1977's Motility with his Ecstasy quartet, and 1980's Playground, with vocal legend Sheila Jordan, available as a three-CD box set, complete with liner notes by Bob Blumenthal. There's considerable cross-over of material; Kuhn's not a prolific writer, but he has managed to turn a relatively small repertoire into a profoundly meaningful one.

With two very different quartet contexts augmenting the solo disc—both featuring a traditional piano-bass-drums foundation, but one featuring woodwind multi-instrumentalist Steve Slagle, and the other with Jordan bring a lyrical interpretation to Kuhn's writing—Life's Backward Glances refracts Kuhn's music through three very different prisms, each with its own set of colors and undeniable charm.

Chapter Index

1. Ecstasy
2. Motility
3. Playground

Recorded the day after the sessions for Trance—featuring bassist Steve Swallow, drummer Jack DeJohnette and percussionist Sue Evans—was complete, it's no surprise that Kuhn would revisit some of the same material, but this time in the more liberated context of a solo recording. By this time ECM had almost single-handedly revived the art of solo recording—piano in particular, with seminal entries from Keith Jarrrett (1972's Facing You), Chick Corea (1970's Piano Improvisations Vol. 1 and 1972's Piano Improvisations Vol. 2) and Paul Bley (1973's Open, To Love)—and Kuhn's addition to ECM's canon, not surprisingly, possesses its own unique personality.

Kuhn's writing—always lyrical, sometimes melancholy and always bearing the potential for descent into a tumultuous maelstrom—is a dramatic, swirling chaos but one from which Kuhn invariable manages to escape, returning to the vivid melodies that define his compositions. The opening "Silver" is also performed solo in Trance, but here he extends it to nearly triple the length, beginning in spare impressionism before gradually introducing a kind of flexible time. Dark-hued, Kuhn's free association allows this initially poignant lament to gradually turn more forceful, while never losing its evocative core.

"Prelude in G" is a spontaneous creation yet, much like Jarrett, Kuhn possesses a remarkable ability to pull form from the ether, with a simple arpeggiated pattern gradually dissolving into greater anarchy, building to a turbulent climax that ends almost as suddenly as it begins. "Ulla," which would resurface years later as the title track to his return to ECM, Return to Tomorrow (1996), holds the closest markers to the jazz tradition. At a time when artists were oftentimes turning away from that tradition, for Kuhn it was always a fundamental component of who he was. Still, its changes—linked by passing notes to create a chordal foundation for Kuhn's singable theme—feel somehow inevitable even as they sound new and fresh.

A 12-minute combination of the introspective "Thoughts of a Gentleman" (later revisited as "Gentle Thoughts" on Playground), and even more melancholic "The Saga of Harrison Crabfeathers" (later to become "Poem for No. 15" on Playground), an oblique reference to the tragic plane crash that took the life of New York Yankees catcher Thurston Munson, again visit Kuhn's penchant for moving from impressionism to expressionism, as the violent resonance of "Crabfeathers" continues to descend into greater turmoil, unsettlingly alternating with sudden returns to form. Kuhn's disposition for high drama is marked by a surprising ability to avoid blatant melodrama, instead mining emotions ranging from refined elegance to raw catharsis.