Joe Lovano hears something new in the air, and he’s named his latest project after it. The saxophone titan has announced ‘Paramount Quartet’, a striking new ECM set that teams him with guitarist Julian Lage, bassist Asante Santi Debriano, and drummer Will Calhoun, the last known for his work in American rock outfit Living Colour. “I feel like at this point I’m on the rise,” Lovano says, brushing past decades of experience and dozens of leader dates. “We’ve arrived at this unique place with this quartet, it’s very special. It’s a new thing. Recording this with Manfred [Eicher] in the studio, I was really thrilled with the way the group continuously developed. And those cats, they play with a real global awareness.”
The group came together by chance. Lovano met Debriano and Calhoun at a 2023 fundraiser for Puerto Rican hurricane relief, and the connection was instant. “Sometimes you meet, and it’s like you’ve known each other your whole life,” he says. “That happened with Will, Asante and I.” Adding Lage was the natural next move, the two having talked about collaborating since Lage played in one of Lovano’s Berklee ensembles around 2006.
The record moves freely across moods. It opens with Charlie Haden’s “First Song,” a refined invocation full of soulful yearning, a tune Lovano fell for while subbing in Haden’s Quartet West years ago. His own compositions carry the rest, from the rubato unisons of “Amsterdam” to the groove-laden post-bop of “Fanfare For Unity,” the extended forms of “The Great Outdoors,” and the easy mid-tempo sway of “Congregation.”
The band adapts to anything, dropping to chamber-music quiet on “The Call” and lighting up “Fanfare For Unity” with electricity. Lovano adds his own dimension by switching instruments mid-song, moving between tenor sax, tarogato, and soprano as the music calls for it. The interplay is constant and alive.
Lovano is effusive about his bandmates. “Will Calhoun has a way of playing that is so expansive and beautiful in so many directions,” he says, going on to praise Debriano’s Panamanian roots and his history with Archie Shepp and Randy Weston, and calling Lage among the most gifted players in the music. The set marks Lage’s first recording for ECM, and his solos throughout are agile and precise, full of harmonic double stops and elegant phrasing that lock right into Lovano’s winding lines.
The two go back decades, ever since Lovano met a teenage Lage at a McCoy Tyner gig at Yoshi’s in California in the early 2000s. That history shows in the music’s ease. The set’s other non-original, Wayne Shorter’s “Lady Day,” gets a graceful reading, with Lovano breathing fresh life into a melody he first heard on Shorter’s ‘Soothsayer’. “Just the theme alone is haunting,” he says. “There’s so much possibility in the harmonies and the harmonic rhythm.”
Recorded in February 2025 at La Buissonne Studios in Southern France and produced by Manfred Eicher, ‘Paramount Quartet’ captures four players locking into something rare.