Clark Tracey has gathered a group of top-of-the-list UK jazz artists for a session that incorporates hard bop, some smooth jazz, and pretty ballads with a string quartet in attendance. For his debut solo album drummer Clark Tracey has brought together a range of musicians, each hand-picked as a result of who he thought best suited the mood of each piece. With connections borne of years in the industry Clark was able to have his first choice of performer on each instrument resulting in unbeatable interpretations. The guests musicians include Andy Sheppard, Tommy Smith, Tim Garland, Iain Ballamy, Nigel Hitchcock, Guy Barker, Christine Tobin, Gareth Williams, Arnie Somogyi, Laurence Cottle and the Locrian String Quartet.

"Quercus" means ‘oak’ in Latin and the roots of this particular tree dig deep into British folk music, while leaves and branches reach upward to embrace jazz-inspired lyrical improvising. The trio features the venerable English singer June Tabor whose dark voice has an uncanny ability to underscore the emotional essence of a ballad: “As I get older, I understand more the depths of sorrow and joy that made the song”, she has said. Tabor, who was recently voted BBC Folk Awards Singer Of The Year, is joined in the Quercus project by Welsh jazz pianist and composer Huw Warren, and by English saxophonist Iain Ballamy, well-known to ECM listeners as co-leader of the band Food. This is the first Quercus album but the trio has existed already for seven years, patiently developing its unique idiomatic blend.

Quercus’s self-titled ECM debut won the album-of-the-year award of the German Record Critics in 2013, was widely praised by the international press, and especially celebrated in Britain where June Tabor has long reigned as “the dark voiced queen of English folk music” (to quote The Times). Folk and jazz and chamber music become one in Quercus’s world, where recontextualizing of material is part of the process, prompting listeners to pay heightened attention even to familiar songs. Nightfall opens with the most famous of farewells in “Auld Lang Syne”, and gently breathes new life into it, leading us into a programme that includes Bob Dylan’s “Don’t Think Twice”, the jazz standard “You Don’t Know What Love Is” and the West Side Story ballad “Somewhere”, as well as original compositions by Huw Warren and Iain Ballamy and songs from British folk tradition, in stark and moving new arrangements.

The British/Norwegian Food duo of Iain Ballamy and Thomas Strønen are joined again by Austrian guitarist and electronics player Christian Fennesz for a new album of powerful grooves, evocative textures and exploratory improvisation, sometimes hypnotically insistent, sometimes turbulent. The project was recorded with engineer Ulf Holand and mixed together with Manfred Eicher the first time Eicher and Holand have collaborated since Nils Petter Molvaer's Khmer, almost 20 years ago. Thomas Strønen describes the sound of "This Is Not A Miracle" as heavier, dryer, connecting more with how we actually sound live.

The group Food has defined a new kind of lyrical electroacoustic improvisation since its founding as a quartet in 1998. Now a core duo of UK saxophonist Iain Ballamy and Norwegian drummer Thomas Strønen, they are joined by guests as needed for various projects. Following live dates in Norway in 2007 and 2008 with trumpeter Nils Petter Molvær and Austrian improvising guitarist Christian Fennesz, the four musicians headed into the studio to record the highly praised "Quiet Inlet", resplendent with melodic improvisation, trancelike pulses and shifting clouds of sound.

The Food team of Norwegian drummer Strønen and British saxophonist Ballamy continues to invite guests to bring something to the table. The form-and-texture conscious improvisations here are drawn from live performances in Norway, England and Germany and studio sessions at Oslo’s Rainbow. To the latter group belong tracks on which Indian slide guitarist and singer Prakash Sontakke is partnered by Eivind Aarset’s atmospheric guitar and electronics. The first half of the album finds Food augmented by Austrian guitarist Christian Fennesz, taking further the experiments with layers of sound begun on "Quiet Inlet". Nils Petter Molvær joins Strønen, Ballamy and Fennesz for a track recorded at Mannheim’s Enjoy Jazz Festival.