Home » Jazz Musicians » Steve Swallow Discography

Winter Songs

Buy Album

Steve Swallow

Label: ECM Records
Released: 2026
Views: 1,809

Tracks

One; Two; Three; Four; Five; Six; Seven; Eight; Nine.

Personnel

Album Description

“I was there when this music was written. In fact my hand held the pencil. I began with the need to do something to fill each long day, and music rushed forward to sustain me. 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.

This recording rose out of a spontaneous community - my dear friends the players and our engineer, the piano tuner, the guy who brought us sandwiches, the harried clerk who checked me into my hotel room on 48th street… The cast grew to contain multitudes. Music is pervasive, and I’m not surprised that Winter Songs has found its way to you.”

– Steve Swallow

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. 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 own observations of the music and its inception (found above) are 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 feel for space and interplay are in full bloom here and pull through the suite of nine untitled winter songs with a strong sense of direction.

Album uploaded by Kevin Poindexter