This is Chris Potter's third album for ECM. The first, The Sirens, was inspired by Homer's Odyssey and introduced David Virelles on prepared piano, celeste and harmonium, with pianist Craig Taborn plus bass and drums, while Imaginary Cities featured his Underground Orchestra. The Dreamer returns to a ‘blowing’ format of sax, piano, bass and drums and introduces what Potter hopes will be his regular working band, which in today's parlance means getting together once, twice a year for brief tours. Potter, who can raise the roof in live performance with power and invention that can scare fellow sax players into a new line of work, is in more reflective and rhapsodic mood here on six of his original compositions. Opening with his original ballad ‘Heart In Hand’, he reveals a mastery of melodic invention while a glimpse of his ease at faster tempos is displayed on ‘Ilimba’. The Dreamer is a mature statement by an artist not seeking to impress, but more interested in exploring mood and melody in a way that takes time to digest, so is longer lasting in its effect.

Jazzwise spoke to Chris Potter about the album

What were your thoughts when you started thinking about making your third album for ECM?

Well I guess there were a few factors, for one thing with The Sirens and Imaginary Cities there was a kind of conceptual framework there, and I kind of wanted to get back to writing an album of tunes, and the whole idea was to introduce a working band, it was extremely difficult to get the one from The Sirens as everyone is extremely busy who was on that date, or to do any dates with Imaginary Cities which is such a large ensemble… so I just wrote maybe 25 tunes, to see what [the band] wanted to be and we did a bunch of gigs on the road, and experimented with it all and ended up with the six on the album. Of course, we do a lot more live, but this was a bit of a return to [the] more conventional idea where there's a working band and this is its repertoire.

Tenor sax plus rhythm is a configuration that has appeared on countless albums before. Do you feel you're being challenged by the weight of the past?

I think the main thing I was thinking about was: ‘What exactly can you do with basically an acoustic setting of piano, bass, drums and sax? Where exactly can that go that hasn't already been done?’ The natural tendency I guess, is to use those references we all have, there's a certain comfort in that and also the reason there's so many albums with that instrumentation is that it works really well, so that was the dialogue I was having with myself in terms of what the direction ought to be. Of course, when it really gets down to nuts and bolts and you're in the middle of a gig you're sort of relying on your instincts and it'll be what it's going to be, but I did try to find certain conceptual things that would make certain it wouldn't sound like John Coltrane's band or whatever, because I feel those records are really strong in my head and in every jazz listener's head.

ECM's Manfred Eicher is a legendary producer, how do you see his work from the ground floor, so to speak?

It remains a mystery, even to me, with all these projects I've done before with him. I've just written some music, formed a band and we've gone into the studio and recorded that music, the same as we always did, and he has made some comments, you know… and yet, somehow, at the end of the day, they sound like ECM records. That's a bit of a mystery to me.