Keyboardist Craig Taborn’s Daylight Ghosts is the Minneapolis-bred New Yorker’s third ECM release as a leader, a quartet album following the solo Avenging Angel and trio disc Chants. Both projects earned wide acclaim, with The Guardian stating that Taborn’s “musicality and his attention to detail are hypnotic, as is his remarkable sense of compositional narrative within an improvised performance.” Along with Taborn on piano and electronic keyboards, the quartet of Daylight Ghosts includes two other luminaries from the New York scene - reed player Chris Speed and bassist Chris Lightcap - plus drummer Dave King, the leader’s fellow Minnesota native and one-third of The Bad Plus. Each player draws from a broad artistic background, as informed by rock, electronica and diverse strains of world music as they are the various permutations of jazz improvisation. Dynamism and spectral ambience, acoustic and electric sounds, groove and lingering melody - all come together to animate Daylight Ghosts.
