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Artist: Mark Turner

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Mark Turner:

Return from the Stars

Mark Turner has been a frequent and significant presence on ECM recordings of the last dozen years, bringing his saxophone artistry and his musical commitment to recordings with Enrico Rava, the Billy Hart Quartet, the cooperative Fly trio (with Jeff Ballard and Larry Grenadier), Stefano Bollani and, most recently, Ethan Iverson, on the duo recording Temporary Kings. Albums under Turner’s leadership, however, have been rare and Return from the Stars is the first ECM recording to feature his quartet since 2014’s Lathe of Heaven.

Turner’s writing for his group on Return from the Stars gives the players plenty of space in which to move, on an album both exhilarating and thoughtful in its arc of expression. Solos flow organically out of the arrangements and, beneath the dazzling interplay of Turner’s tenor and Jason Palmer’s trumpet, bassist Joe Martin and drummer Jonathan Pinson often roam freely. The absence of a chordal instrument keeps the conversational possibilities in the music wide open, as the compositions modulate between the meticulously structured and the loosely guided. Mark Turner puts a lot of faith in intuition and the shared artistic goals of an ensemble, and cherishes the narrative tension arising from the juxtaposition of freedom and responsibility: