Audiople Review: In previous years, the ECM label’s reissue campaigns have sometimes seemed a little random. The current Luminescence series, though, is getting fan-favourite ambient jazz classics back into print like nobody’s business. You may have purchased its recent repress of the excellent first Azimuth album. And we’re all anticipating finally snagging a vinyl copy of Bennie Maupin’s magnificent ‘The Jewel in the Lotus’. But this week’s entry into the series is ‘Gateway’, a 1975 meeting between three of ECM’s heaviest hitters. This is guitarist John Abercrombie’s album, really, and he’s on especially fiery form here. Label boss and super-producer Manfred Eicher was a double bass player, so ECM bassists always sound great. And Dave Holland’s tone on ‘Gateway’ is especially rich and textured. But when Jack DeJohnette is on drums, he’s almost always the best thing about the session. Here, DeJohnette does his usual trick of making sure everyone else plays to the absolute limit of their abilities. The result is everything you could want from a classic-era ECM release: ambient jazz atmospheres, free improv edginess, and some serious spiritual heat. Meditative but never soppy. Oh, and with a lovely cover painting from Maja Weber, wife of quintessential ECM bassist Eberhard. Heck, everything about this album is quintessential. Not to mention essential.

With “daring and visionary spirit”, to quote a Downbeat review from the year of this album’s release, master improvisers John Abercrombie, Dave Holland and Jack DeJohnette forged a unique vision of trio interplay on their first joint effort under the Gateway moniker. The trio tackles Dave Holland and Jack DeJohnette originals with a visionary idea of what three-way conversations in jazz could sound like. As The Observer remarked in an article of the time, “the telepathic ensemble playing and perfect execution make it difficult to believe that this music is almost completely improvised”. The players’ respectively unique instrumental signatures had already fully crystallised here, hinting at the music to come.

The Luminessence edition of the album arrives in a Tip-on gatefold, complete with previously unseen archival photos and new liner notes by Wilco’s Nels Cline.

One thing most recordings on the label share in common is the capturing of special moments in real time. That is what “Gateway” is, what it feels like so many years later, for as long as we have ears to listen. – from the liner notes by Nels Cline