Eberhard Weber - Colours / 3CD

This three CD box brings together music recorded for ECM by Eberhard Weber’s band Colours: the albums Yellow Fields (1975), Silent Feet (1977) and Little Movements (1980). Throughout the six years of its existence, Colours was one of the most popular ensembles on the European jazz touring circuit – although Weber has always stressed the group’s conceptual distance from a jazz mainstream. Many idiomatic elements were combined in Colours’ stylistic mix. The group’s sound-world consciously extended the palette proposed by “The Colours of Chloё”, Weber’s prize-winning ECM disc of 1974. As the innovative German bassist explains in the liner notes, “there were various aspects to the [Chloё] session, from the reflective European or chamber music side of the writing, to some jazz-rock and a kind of pictorial play with minimalism. Eventually, all these aspects would be developed in Colours.” This box set, the latest in ECM’s acclaimed Old & Masters Edition, is rush-released in time for the presentation of the German Jazz Award/Albert Mangelsdorff Prize to Eberhard Weber in Berlin on November 6.