When a stroke in 2007 robbed bassist Eberhard Weber of the ability to play his bass, it looked like one of the most influential careers in European jazz was at an end.
But rather than curse the silence, Weber took live recordings of his solos from the preceding two decades and began re-working them, accompanying his younger self, one-handed, at the keyboards, orchestrating, rearranging and in many respects recomposing his own original improvisations.
Encore is the second album to result from this process, and Weber admits it may well be his last. Ethereal, otherworldly but always compelling, it is a creative act of musical time travel and an elegy to a career that for many defined the much-vaunted ECM sound, heard here in all its pristine glory.
