Trygve Seim
Frode Haltli
Our Time

Trygve Seim soprano and tenor saxophones
Frode Haltli accordion
Recorded June 2023, Himmelfahrtskirche, Munich
Engineer: Stefano Amerio
Cover photo: Thomas Wunsch
Produced by Manfred Eicher
Release date: September 13, 2024

For the past 25 years, saxophonist Trygve Seim and accordionist Frode Haltli have compacted dirt together as musical allies one step at a time. In this successor to 2008’s Yeraz, the duo opens a new door of their advent calendar into a world of freshly tilled land.

The set is pillared by four improvisations, each of which blends into a through-composed selection. Across this spectrum, they carve into introspection and extroversion, and back again. Seim has such an ancient approach to the modern reed, which at his lips sounds like a duduk, as Haltli’s wingflaps take his uplift to heart. Delicacy abounds, along with mature textural contrasts, each of which elicits a mood, a picture, a song. In “Shyama Sundara Madana Mohana,” a North Indian folk song, higher notes seek transcendence, while colors come alive in Igor Stravinsky’s “Les Cinq Doigts No. 5.”

Aside from “Oy Khodyt’ Son, Kolo Vikon,” a traditional Ukrainian lullaby rendered with just as much freedom and love as anything unscripted between them, the album is largely self-composed. From Haltli’s “Du, mi tid” to Seim’s “Elegi,” they plant one careful seed after another, watering with patient listening. The gradualness of their hindsight pays commensurate deference to the subject matters at hand. It is as if theirs was a world of shadows whose existence is discernible only because of the light they carry. Although we cannot know for sure where they are going, the music hints at a destination known only to the subconscious mind. Rising tensions mingle with artful release as the landscape feels warmer and less distant, more human than before. Amid all of this emotional shading, “Arabian Tango” feels like a once-in-a-lifetime joy. The most delicate tenor notes from its composer mesh beautifully with Haltli’s solo of sorts, while the space of the room itself lends a voice to this dance of emergence and recession.

Taken as a whole, Our Time is a mountain compressed into breath and exhaled in words of snow.