Larry Grenadier’s The Gleaners is a profound and highly creative album, harvesting influences from many sources, its title inspired by Agnès Varda’s film The Gleaners and I. In between his own pieces here, including a dedication to early hero Oscar Pettiford, Grenadier explores compositions by George Gershwin, John Coltrane, Paul Motian, Rebecca Martin and Wolfgang Muthspiel. “The process for making this record began with a look inward,” Larry writes in his liner note, “an excavation into the core elements of who I am as a bass player. It was a search for a center of sound and timbre, for the threads of harmony and rhythm that formulate the crux of a musical identity.”

The result is an important addition to ECM’s series of distinguished solo bass albums. The Gleaners was recorded at New York’s Avatar Studios in December 2016, and produced by Manfred Eicher.