by Thom Jurek34-year old guitarist, composer, and bandleader Jacob Young hails from Oslo, Norway, making him a natural for Manfred Eicher's ECM label. Young was educated at the New School for Jazz and Contemporary Music in New York, where he studied under Jim Hall and privately with John Abercrombie. That said, Young's Evening Falls is the most auspicious guitar debut for the label since perhaps Pat Metheny's Bright Size Life. Young's warm, rounded tone indicates his debt to Hall and his deep extended harmonic palette to Abercrombie, but his extended melodic vocabulary, gorgeous phrasing, and notions of group interplay are his own. What is immediately startling about Evening Falls is its lyricism, and how it doesn't sound like a guitarist's date. Young's compositions reflect the notion of song, overtly paying careful attention to nuance and dynamic. Inside his deep and winding lyricism is plenty of room for improvisation and group interplay -- with veteran drummer Jon Christensen, trumpeter Mathias Eick, bass clarinetist and saxophonist Vidar Johansen, and bassist Mats Eilertsen -- around melodic invention. On "Sky," Young weaves a spacious frame that engages and centers around his own atmospheric guitaristry. It underscores and accents the trumpet's singing voice and the elegant, restrained use of bass clarinet and tenor as a backing voice, offering shadowy, restrained counterpoint and harmonic extension. His fills dip and float and point, and his gorgeous chord voicings are imaginative and painterly, guiding the tune from underneath, stepping out front only as the tune dictates. As a soloist, his command of technique is basically flawless; he's smooth yet soulful, graceful with just enough edge to make his occasional improvisational angularities poignant. The opener, "Blue," opens with guitar and bass, establishing an elegiac backdrop for the trumpeter and bass clarinet. Eick is mournful and melancholy, and is given added depth and dimension by Johansen's spare lines slipping out from just underneath the line to lengthen its impression. The counterpoint between Young and Eilertsen that introduces "Falling," the album closer, is breathtaking. Before the triumvirate front line enters in earnest, the respect for silence and language is breathtaking because of its brevity. What this final impression brings home is the great tenderness and empathy in Young's music that makes for a beautifully balanced, elegantly performed, and poetically rendered listening experience.