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Between them, this week’s two jazz releases – one live album, one studio recording – run the gamut of emotions. Arild Andersen’s extroverted trio with Tommy Smith and Paolo Vinaccia raises the roof with the exultant In-House Science. And Jakob Bro’s Returnings finds a tender sonic poetry in atmospheric group music with Palle Mikkelborg, Thomas Morgan and Jon Christensen.
In-House Science
Arild Andersen
Release date: 23.03.2018
ECM 2594
Format :
CD
Cart Buy CD € 17.90
EN / DE
Norwegian master bassist Arild Andersen’s trio with big-toned tenorist Tommy Smith and powerhouse drummer Paolo Vinaccia is one of the most viscerally exciting jazz small groups of the present moment. Its energies are arguably best captured in a live context, and here the three musicians deliver a characteristically smoking performance at the Villa Rothstein in Bad Ischl, Austria, recorded in September 2016. Their earlier concert recording Live At Belleville, was issued a decade ago to rave reviews and a shower of awards. “Absolutely and unreservedly marvellous” said the BBC Music Magazine. “How often do just three musicians produce music as vast and panoramic in its scale and vision?” asked Jazzwise, amazed.
Norwegian master bassist Arild Andersen’s trio with big-toned Scottish tenorist Tommy Smith and Italian-born powerhouse drummer Paolo Vinaccia is one of the most viscerally exciting jazz small groups of the present moment. Some of its energies are arguably best captured in a live context, and here the three musicians deliver a characteristically smoking performance, recorded at the PKS Villa Rothstein in Bad Ischl, Austria, September 2016.
The trio’s earlier concert recording, Live At Belleville, was issued a decade ago to rave reviews and a shower of awards. “Absolutely and unreservedly marvellous” said the BBC Music Magazine. “How often do just three musicians produce music as vast and panoramic in its scale and vision?” asked Jazzwise rhetorically.
In recent interviews, Andersen has reflected on the group’s work method. “In the trio everyone is equal. Tommy might play the melody instrument, but he can also be an accompanist, and Paolo and I are the rhythm section but either us can also be the lead voice… We are all soloists or rhythm section, the three of us simultaneously. It’s all to do with interplay, and as a trio we have developed quite a chemistry. Tommy is very good at listening to the bass and drums when he plays solo, and he leaves spaces for us to come up front again.” This is evident throughout this programme of Andersen compositions, and not least on the album’s longest track “Science” which flies forth at breakneck tempo and keeps changing its angle of attack. Smith’s iron grip on its swerving rhythms is as profound as that of his partners and Andersen, equally, is as eloquent a soloist as the outstanding saxophonist.
“Mira” was the title track of the trio’s studio album of 2014, originally conceived by Arild as a “Sunday morning album”. It opens In-House Science, transformed by the momentum of the night-time live performance. The same goes for “Blussy”, already powerful in the studio version, it is elevated to a new level of intensity in the rivetingly dynamic performance here, capped by overblown saxophone.
Andersen’s commitment to burning energy music is of course not a new development but a continuation: in the early 1970s he played urgent streams-of-sound music in sax/bass/drum trios with Sam Rivers and Barry Altschul, with Juhani Aaltonen and Edward Vesala, and with Jan Garbarek and Vesala (see Triptkyon). The trio with Smith and Vinaccia extends this distinguished tradition on its own terms.
“North of the North Wind”, thematically connected to an earlier Andersen cycle – refer to the 1997 release Hyperborean – begins with Arild playing his bass together with a sampler to create rich quasi-orchestral sonorities before Smith enters and the piece drifts into free ballad territory, with moving statements from tenor sax and double bass.
“In-House”, in its full-throated exultation a sort of partner piece to “Outhouse” on the Live At Belleville set, brings the album to a triumphant close, incorporating along the way solos by each of the trio members.
(As well as bracketing two song-titles together, album title In-House Science alludes to the venue where this fiery music was documented, the PKS Villa Rothstein, whose history has a connection to scientific inquiry, the “PKS” standing for Pythagoras Kepler System. The PKS Organization is devoted to furthering the study of natural energy as outlined by Viktor Schauberger and other unconventional researchers.)
The launch of In-House Science is celebrated with concerts in Japan, where the trio is joined by guest pianist Makoto Ozone for performances in Tokyo, Nagoya and Yokohama.
Arild Andersen was born in Oslo in 1945. He has been an ECM artist for almost 50 years, first recording for the label in 1970 on Afric Pepperbird with Jan Garbarek, Terje Rypdal and Jon Christensen. In the same period he worked with Scandinavian residents Don Cherry and George Russell, and backed a long line of visiting Americans – from Sonny Rollins to Chick Corea. After a New York sojourn in the early 1970s that found him working with Sam Rivers, Paul Bley, Steve Kuhn and Sheila Jordan, he returned to Norway and began leading his own bands. His first ECM leader dates were revisited in the box set Green In Blue: Early Quartets in 2010. Arild Andersen has issued more than 20 albums as a leader or co-leader for ECM, along the way making listeners aware of talents including Jon Balke, Tore Brunborg, Nils Petter Molvaer and Vassilis Tsabropoulos, all of whom first came to international attention as young musicians with Andersen bands. In 2008 he received the Jazz Musician of the Year award from France’s Académie du Jazz.
Paolo Vinaccia was born in Italy in 1954, and has been based in Norway since 1979. He has toured and recorded with musicians including Terje Rypdal, Jon Christensen, Bendik Hofseth, Ketil Bjørnstad, Palle Mikkelborg, David Darling, Dhafer Youssef, Mike Mainieri and many others. On ECM he appears on Terje Rypdal’s Crime Scene, Vossabrygg, and Skywards albums, as well as Arild Andersen’s Hyperborean, Electra and Live at Belleville. Releases under his own name include the live box set Very Much Alive (Jazzland, 2010) with Rypdal, Mikkelborg, Wesseltoft and Ståle Storløkken.
Saxophonist Tommy Smith, born in Edinburgh in 1967, made his mark on the Scottish jazz scene with his first album Giant Strides, recorded when he was sixteen, in 1983. That same year he won a scholarship to attend the Berklee College of Music in Boston. There, he formed the group Forward Motion, and also joined Gary Burton’s band, with which he appeared on the ECM album Whiz Kids in 1986. He has since released more than twenty albums under his own name for numerous labels, including his own Spartacus imprint. Smith has worked in small groups and big bands, recording and touring with Joe Lovano, David Liebman, Benny Golson, Gary Burton, Chick Corea, Tommy Flanagan, John Scofield, Miroslav Vitouš, Jack DeJohnette and many more. He has composed for and performed with classical orchestras and ensembles including the Orchestra of St. John’s Square, the Scottish Ensemble, the Edinburgh Youth Orchestra and the Paragon Ensemble. Smith founded the Scottish National Jazz Orchestra in 1995, and remains its director. The orchestra is heard on the ECM album Celebration, with Arild Andersen as principal soloist.
Featured artists
Arild Andersen Double Bass
Paolo Vinaccia Drums
Tommy Smith Tenor Saxophone
Returnings
Jakob Bro
Release date: 23.03.2018
ECM 2546
Format :
CD
Cart Buy CD € 17.90
EN / DE
“Danish guitarist Jakob Bro creates magical music, impossible to categorize”, wrote Downbeat recently. On Returnings the magic is intensified as Bro and musical soul-mate Thomas Morgan reconnect with two living legends of European jazz, trumpeter Palle Mikkelborg and drummer Jon Christensen. It’s a wonderful combination: Bro’s watercolour guitar sounds, Mikelborg’s soft Milesian flugelhorn, Morgan’s impeccable choice of notes, and Christensen’s free-floating drumming . These components add up to one of the prettiest and subtlest jazz albums of recent times. Returnings was recorded in July 2016 at Oslo’s Rainbow Studio and produced by Manfred Eicher.
“Danish guitarist Jakob Bro creates magical music, impossible to categorize”, wrote Downbeat, reviewing his album Streams. On Returnings, the magic is intensified as Bro and musical soul-mate Thomas Morgan join forces with two distinguished elders of European jazz, trumpeter Palle Mikkelborg and drummer Jon Christensen. It’s an inspired combination: Bro’s watercolour guitar sounds, Mikkelborg’s soft, sometimes Milesian flugelhorn, Morgan’s impeccable choice of notes, and Christensen’s free-floating drumming. These components add up to one of the prettiest and subtlest jazz albums of recent times.
The theme of “returnings” is central. The album opens with a new version of “Oktober”, picking up the story from Bro’s album Gefion. In recent years, Jakob’s trio with Thomas Morgan and Joey Baron has, happily, gained a strong following. Meanwhile, the guitarist had also been looking for a context in which to continue his association with Jon Christensen. Returnings provides this. It also reunites Christensen with Palle Mikkelborg for the first time on ECM since Terje Rypal’s Vossabrygg (recorded in 2003), and marks the drummer’s return to playing after a break of more than a year.
“I never considered the first trio to be a one off”, says Bro, noting that bassist Morgan plays differently with Christensen than in the group with Joey Baron. “In some ways Thomas is a very socially-skilled bass player! He’s picking up on Jon’s ideas, he’s making the melody sound better and he’s also accompanying each of us in the improvised sections. It’s incredible what he does simultaneously.”
Bro has admired Palle Mikkelborg’s playing for as long as he can remember. “I’ve known Palle since I was a kid,” he says. “I was playing trumpet myself, then, and listening to him a lot.” Both musicians live in Copenhagen, “and the scene is quite small, so we’ve crossed paths quite often. A few years ago, we were talking about collaborating on a large-scale music for choir. Then we decided to concentrate first on more improvised music. So I called Jon and Thomas and invited them to play with us. We did two concerts together with this formation in 2014 which really made me think about the potential. And Palle and I would meet, talk, drink wine and play a bit every few weeks, and gradually ideas for the album came together.”
Working towards the music for this session, Bro and Mikkelborg began with the title track. “The main part of that is Palle’s. He had come up with a composition based on the letters ECM and Manfred Eicher’s name – similar in a way to his composition ‘Aura’ that he’d done for Miles Davis –s almost a mathematical construction. We started improvising on that and developing it and it became, I think, an essential part of the programme.” It seems to contain flashes of ECM history in its source code, and the way that Christensen and Palle Mikkelborg interact and overlap here is likely to make older listeners and scholars recall the tonalities and textures of 1970s albums like Waves and Descendre. Nonetheless, following Christensen’s free drumming, and the independence of the four voices moving in the transparent mix, leaves a deeper impression of music both modern and timeless.
“I think it’s both fragile and strong at the same time,” says Bro of the music’s contrasting attributes, “and I love the way Jon very often won’t give you the obvious stressed rhythm you might expect. When Palle is playing strong lines, Jon is heading somewhere else in his own way. To my ears that’s really interesting.”
For playing the unexpected in a jazz context, Jon Christensen has few rivals, though one of them would have been the late Paul Motian, erstwhile employer of both Bro and Morgan. The piece “Hamsun” here, dedicated to the Norwegian author of such classics as Hunger and Mysteries, was also partly inspired by Motian. “Paul Motian had talked a lot about Knut Hamsun when we toured together, and that got me reading the books…This is an older piece which I’d written originally for Kenny Wheeler to play.” The version of the tune on Returnings is played as a duet by Bro and Morgan.
Mikkelborg’s piece “View” begins with Christensen and Morgan in duo, with Palle and Jakob introducing the theme only after the halfway mark. Bro: “This is really a collaborative album, the outcome of a creative session with good input from everybody. Musically, any one of us could be considered the ‘leader’.”
One of the most touching pieces is “Song for Nicolai”, for Danish bassist Nicolai Munch-Hansen, who passed away last year, with soulful playing from both Mikkelborg and Bro.
“Oktober” was included at the suggestion of Manfred Eicher. “It’s also a piece that Palle likes to play, and at the mixing stage it was becoming clear that this version had a special character.” The tune “Lyskaster”, also heard on Gefion, is dedicated to the memory of Jakob Bro’s father. “On Gefion, we had just touched the melody [in a version more spacious and textural]. Here, Palle and I play it together, and that felt good. Also, my father was a trumpet player, too, and liked Palle’s sound. So, I was thinking about that as well.”
Returnings was recorded in July 2016 at Oslo’s Rainbow Studio and produced by Manfred Eicher. Further ECM projects with Jakob Bro are in preparation. Next up: a live album with Thomas Morgan and Joey Baron, recorded in New York.
The Bro/Mikklelborg/Morgan/Christensen quartet will be playing some of the festivals this summer, including the Copenhagen Jazz Festival. More details soon.
Featured artists
Jakob Bro Guitar
Palle Mikkelborg Trumpet, Flugelhorn
Thomas Morgan Double Bass
Jon Christensen Drums
Upcoming concerts
Mar 23 Anouar Brahem Quartet w/ Gesing/Meyer/Yassine Châlons-en-Champagne France
Mar 23 András Schiff Hohenems Austria
Mar 23 Vijay Iyer Sextet w/ Stephan Crump, Tyshawn Sorey, Steve Lehman, Mark Shim, Graham Haynes capetown South Africa
Mar 23 Mathias Eick Oslo Norway
Mar 23 Arild Andersen Quartet Voss Norway
Mar 24 Dénes Várjon Portland United States of America
Mar 24 Vijay Iyer Sextet w/ Stephan Crump, Tyshawn Sorey, Steve Lehman, Mark Shim, Graham Haynes Capetown South Africa
Mar 24 Thomas Zehetmair Rotterdam Netherlands
Mar 24 Mathias Eick Kristiansand Norway
Mar 24 Markus Stockhausen / Florian Weber Manchester United Kingdom
Mar 25 Dénes Várjon Portland United States of America
Mar 25 András Schiff Heidelberg Germany
Mar 25 Theo Bleckmann Porto Portugal
Mar 25 Thomas Zehetmair Rotterdam Netherlands
Mar 25 Arvo Pärt Bristol United Kingdom
Mar 25 Danish String Quartet Glasgow United Kingdom
Mar 25 Momo Kodama Paris France
Mar 26 John Potter Quito Ecuador
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