For those not in the know, Mathias Eick sees his new album, When We Leave (out now via ECM Records), as a natural continuation of Ravensburg, almost a Ravensburg 2. More of everything.

Indeed, where its predecessor drew portraits of friends and family and sketched some personal interactions, this new album follows its protagonists through a troubled year.

Furthermore, a sense of narrative could be drawn from the interplay of titles and musical atmosphere: The songs and titles on When We Leave play upon each other, draw inspiration from each other.

1. Loving
2. Caring
3. Turning
4. Flying
5. Arvo
6. Playing
7. Begging

This crystalline new recording opens on the diaphanous nature of Loving and the sweepingly ambient ebb and flow within Caring and then seamlessly continues onward with the quietly soaring Turning, the stoically-cultured Flying, and then the album rounds out on the playful Arvo, coming to a close on the plaintive adamancy of Playing, and then the warm intricacy of Begging.

Norwegian trumpeter Mathias Eick, who was born in the village of Hem in 1979, took up the piano at five and the trumpet a year later. He recalls that in the family music room we had a vibraphone, a piano, guitars, trumpets, and a French horn. We were five kids and all of us were playing at least one instrument. My father was really into jazz and was also playing all kinds of instruments, and my mother sang in choirs.

Eick subsequently studied trumpet and double bass at the Trondheim Music Academy.

For many years he was a multi-instrumental member of between-the-genres band Jaga Jazzist. For ECM he has recorded with Jacob Young (Evening Falls, Sideways), Iro Haarla (Northbound, Vespers), and Manu Katché (Playground). Eick has performed with musicians of many styles, from Chick Corea and the Trondheim Jazz Orchestra to Norwegian psychedelic rock band Motorpsycho.

As a trumpeter Eick has absorbed many influences – he cites Miles, Clifford Brown, Kenny Wheeler, Tomasz Stanko, Arve Henriksen and Nils Petter Molvær as inspirations – and shaped a language of his own, which incorporates the history of the modern trumpet.

He says: I didn’t want to sound like a copy of any of them. That was a big challenge. It was good to break that barrier.

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