In Pas(s)ing
Mick Goodrick
In Pas(s)ing is the debut album by American jazz guitarist Mick Goodrick, recorded in November 1978 at Oslo’s Talent Studio and released by ECM Records in 1979. The record features an all-star quartet with John Surman on soprano and baritone saxophones and bass clarinet, Eddie Gómez on bass, and Jack DeJohnette on drums, produced by Manfred Eicher in the characteristically spacious, detailed ECM sound. Across five tracks—Feebles, Fables and Ferns, In the Tavern of Ruin, Summer Band Camp, Pedalpusher, and the collectively improvised title piece In Passing—the album presents a quietly adventurous set that moves between flowing fusion, reflective straight-ahead jazz, and almost free, open-form interplay, all within about 43 minutes.
Musically, In Pas(s)ing showcases Goodrick’s thoughtful, harmonically rich guitar style: a clean, airy tone and intricate voicings that critics have likened to a more introspective, cerebral cousin of contemporaries like John Abercrombie. The pieces often begin as gently sculpted themes—Feebles, Fables and Ferns described as “morning and dusk,” or Summer Band Camp as a “fiendishly byzantine post-bop time-bender”—before opening into group improvisations where Surman’s robust reeds, Gómez’s lyrical yet quietly recorded bass, and DeJohnette’s elastic drumming weave around Goodrick’s lines in a relaxed but deeply interactive way. Later reviewers note that the album “takes you by surprise”: it is not an in-your-face, high-intensity session, but a subtle, spacious document of late-1970s free-leaning jazz whose understated complexity and melodic nuance feel remarkably fresh decades later, something underscored by its inclusion in ECM’s modern Luminessence/Touchstones audiophile reissue series.
In Pas(s)ing
Mick Goodrick
In Pas(s)ing is the debut album by American jazz guitarist Mick Goodrick, recorded in November 1978 at Oslo’s Talent Studio and released by ECM Records in 1979. The record features an all-star quartet with John Surman on soprano and baritone saxophones and bass clarinet, Eddie Gómez on bass, and Jack DeJohnette on drums, produced by Manfred Eicher in the characteristically spacious, detailed ECM sound. Across five tracks—Feebles, Fables and Ferns, In the Tavern of Ruin, Summer Band Camp, Pedalpusher, and the collectively improvised title piece In Passing—the album presents a quietly adventurous set that moves between flowing fusion, reflective straight-ahead jazz, and almost free, open-form interplay, all within about 43 minutes.
Musically, In Pas(s)ing showcases Goodrick’s thoughtful, harmonically rich guitar style: a clean, airy tone and intricate voicings that critics have likened to a more introspective, cerebral cousin of contemporaries like John Abercrombie. The pieces often begin as gently sculpted themes—Feebles, Fables and Ferns described as “morning and dusk,” or Summer Band Camp as a “fiendishly byzantine post-bop time-bender”—before opening into group improvisations where Surman’s robust reeds, Gómez’s lyrical yet quietly recorded bass, and DeJohnette’s elastic drumming weave around Goodrick’s lines in a relaxed but deeply interactive way. Later reviewers note that the album “takes you by surprise”: it is not an in-your-face, high-intensity session, but a subtle, spacious document of late-1970s free-leaning jazz whose understated complexity and melodic nuance feel remarkably fresh decades later, something underscored by its inclusion in ECM’s modern Luminessence/Touchstones audiophile reissue series.