With Endless Days, electric bassist Eberhard Weber, one of the best-known deep sounders in European improvisation, continues the journey he so boldly set out on ECM's fertile map. True to form, he breaks with the jazz form that seeks him out, using instead orchestral excursions and precisely notated forms. Solos, per se, are few and far between. The only exceptions are "A Walk In The Garrigue" and "Solo For Bass," the latter already a foretaste of Weber's surely significant résumé. Dancing with a fluid touch, he turns up a molecule and settles into the warmth.

Endless Days' instrumentation is as intimate as its sound is expansive. Multi-editor Paul McCandless, keyboardist Rainer Brüninghaus and drummer Michael DiPasqua - all longtime companions - form a quartet of undisguised lyricism. The bobbing keys of "Concerto For Bass" flash a lush landscape as only Weber can articulate. Flickering percussion propels us across a mosaic of water and land, while an oboe stretches its neck like a bird in anticipation of a storm. A gentle keyboard drone provides ample ground for Weber's supple seedlings, which characteristically build majestic tidal waves from mere ripples in "French Diary." Here, DiPasqua and McCandless flank a wandering piano to the rhythm of an internal clock before ending in a flash of light, adding a new star to the shadows of "Nuit Blanche." This cinematic piece feels like a sepia veneer of whiskey and unrequited love, dripping like a tree after the rain. "Concerto For Piano" kicks the band into high gear. The playful pounding of the keys provides unexpected twists and turns. The title track has the makings of a folk song, unfolding in real time and forming a full-bodied lyric from its cellular vocabulary. This program of otherwise new material ends with a return to Weber's Little Movements, a reworking of the opening composition "The Last Stage Of A Long Journey" from that 1980 album. Flowing arpeggios propel the leaves of Brüninghaus' pianism along an unbroken river and find their angelic alter ego in McCandless, whose soprano saxophone draws a thread from heart to ritual.

The eternally refreshing thing about Weber's work is the comfort that titles are immaterial - so evocative is his sound world that it tells us a different story each time, a story so familiar that it seems to emanate from the listener. The only question that remains to be asked is: What stories will it tell you?