ECM Releases

Keith Jarrett: Hymns/Spheres (ECM 1086/87)

| Tyran Grillo

Hymns Spheres

Keith Jarrett
Hymns/Spheres

Keith Jarrett organ
Recorded September 1976, Ottobeuren Abbey
Engineer: Martin Wieland
Produced by Manfred Eicher

There are musicians and there are magicians. Keith Jarrett is of the latter persuasion. Whenever his fingers touch the keyboard, they seem to have plunged into earth and anointed themselves with million-year-old magma before committing themselves to ivory. To be sure, he is one of the world’s most renowned improvisers, yet Hymns/Spheres—released unabridged at last in this double-CD set—documents an encounter with a grand Baroque organ that seems written in the stars. The organ in question was built by Karl Joseph Riepp in the eighteenth century and is a spectacular instrument in its own right. In communication with Jarrett, it produces sounds of extraordinary color and variety of register (many of the unique effects were produced by pulling stops only partway), sounds that comprise perhaps his most transcendent record to date.

Trying to describe it is like painting every leaf on a tree: far easier to take a photograph and offer it in place of an inferior rendering. Yet the parsing of its canvas over the years justifies a more surgical analysis. When first reissued on CD in 1985 as Spheres (ECM 1302)—i.e., with none of the “Hymns” included—it retained from those titular pieces only the 1st, 4th, 7th, and 9th Movements. Through them Jarrett was telling an eco-minded story, one that follows a single drop of water from the sky (prelude to a storm that never materializes) and freezes it in midair with winter’s coming to the sound of one bird flying south. Feelings of ice pervade the barren trees. The laughter that once ricocheted between them now hangs from the branches, an icicle for every child’s breath. Not all is gloom, however, for there is also a plenitude of warmth to be consumed and savored. Like a sleeping beauty who opens her eyes, only to stare into the depths of her own face, the 7th Movement stands before a mirror of inescapable meditation, while the 9th breaks thaw. Stirrings from below: beetles and earthworms unfurling with virginal respiration. A volcano erupts halfway around the world, yet you feel it in every follicle. Ships release their warning calls. You twist like a braided cord, thinner with each revolution, until your body is a wisp of molecules connecting lad, sea, and sky.

Fans were rightly saddened by the 1985 reissue for lacking five of the nine “Spheres” and the two “Hymns” etched into the original vinyl. The Hymns are especially important in tying this intimate session together; they begin and end its otherwise incomplete circle. Like much of the once-missing material, they are fuller, rib-shattering proclamations, much in contrast to the brooding abridgement. “Hymn Of Remembrance” opens ears and hearts like a church service in which communion is taken in wafers of sound, baptism in a river of glowing breath. “Hymn Of Release” processes along the walls, resting behind pews in postludinal exaltation.

As for the newly restored “Spheres,” they seem to open their mouths and eject columns of light into the very stars. Jarrett threads between the falling debris as many chords as he can before it combusts in the stratosphere (perhaps cluing us in on their collective title). If, in the 2nd Movement, we find ourselves confronted with a blinding vision of spirit, in the 3rd we are shown the opposite in tangled darkness. Jarrett resolves this tension with a pedaled drone, over which he unfurls a hefty banner of unrelenting majesty. The 5th and 6th Movements complicate this resolution with jagged memories, uncertain motives, and tattered masks. The final mystery is reclaimed in the 8th, where notes shimmer with underwater vibrato in a deepening commitment to contemplation.

It’s a shame that over half the album should have once been sacrificed, though I wouldn’t have programmed the Spheres reduction any differently, except perhaps to include the Hymns. Then again, a realization wraps its arms around me as I listen to the whole story anew: this music will never be complete. Its hints of infinity are overwhelming, and we are fortunate enough to know their touch in any form.

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>> Edward Vesala: Satu (ECM 1088)

Keith Jarrett: No End (ECM 2361/62)

| Tyran Grillo

No End

Keith Jarrett
No End

Keith Jarrett electric guitars, Fender bass, drums, tablas, percussion, voice, recorder, piano
Recorded 1986 at Cavelight Studio, New Jersey
Executive producer: Manfred Eicher
An ECM Production

There seems to be no end to Keith Jarrett’s output, so what better title for this archival gem? Recorded directly to cassette in his personal studio in 1986, No End is in many ways the secular counterpart to Spirits, produced under similar circumstances not a year before. Where that earlier album was something of a catharsis for its one-man band, here the emphasis is on essentials. What’s most delightful to hear in this recording is the foundational emphasis on rhythm. Jarrett has always had a flair for syncopation, and here we can experience that impetus in all its naked precision, conveyed by means less mitigated that we’re used to hearing. Foremost in his toolkit are electric guitar, bass, and drums, with hardly a piano lick in earshot. Girded by a refreshing sense of freedom, an inexhaustible creativity that simply must manifest at the intersection of body and instruments, it spins the wheel consistently and spontaneously.

Because so much music has followed this album, it is perhaps inevitable that any comparisons should be retroactive. The opening section, for example, may put one in mind of John Zorn’s film soundtracks—notably downtempo segments of The Big Gundown and Notes on Marie Menken—both in terms of its fecund atmosphere and because of a penchant for Phrygian scales. Gunslinging surf guitar and steady percussion add ornament and charisma. Likewise the mournful sweep of Part XII, which evokes a brand of desolation not out of place in a spaghetti western. Jarrett’s Gibson electric forges a beautiful scene. Indeed, his picking is the loveliest revelation of the album. Slack-jawed and expressive, it emotes with commitment.

There are many details to be savored throughout, such as the vocoder-ish backing vocals, the complementary tribal beats, the occasional deep pocket (e.g., Parts VII & XVI), and the touch of blues that creeps in to finish. Although the piano makes a noticeable appearance only halfway through, Jarrett brings a pianistic approach to the entire assembly, as if each instrument represented a finger in the symphonic economy of his keyboarding. Psychedelic touches are few and far between, blooming only in the more protracted grooves and instances of staggered layering. In the latter regard, Part XVIII is a welcome departure from the regularity that surrounds it, an altered state unto itself.

The beauty of No End is its possibility. It could soundtrack a spy film, for at times its motives seem playfully clandestine. It could just easily stand alone, as here: a valuable experience for the Jarrett enthusiast. The free-flowing jam aesthetic and nostalgic patina of the home recording are in full effect. Tape hiss and distorted max-outs emphasize the fact that this music has come to us out of time and context, wearing the clothing in which it was buried and which it wears under the spotlight of this new millennium.

More of a want than a need for the collector’s shelf, No End might have achieved its purposes in one disc instead of two. Either way, its length serves to emphasize a consistency of vision. As Jarrett avers in his liner notes, “Music is the strongest medicine I know,” thereby dismantling any critical ammunition for what ultimately amounts to an honest slice of sonic pie from one of the greatest musical minds of our time.

(To hear samples of No End, click here.)

Keith Jarrett: The Carnegie Hall Concert (ECM 1989/90)

| Tyran Grillo

The Carnegie Hall Concert

Keith Jarrett
The Carnegie Hall Concert

Keith Jarrett piano
Recorded live September 26, 2005
Engineer: Martin Pearson
Executive Producer: Manfred Eicher

After a long preparatory breath, the experienced gardener digs his fingers into the soil: this is what it feels like to put on Keith Jarrett’s The Carnegie Hall Concert. The ensuing harvest offers a veritable rainbow of sonic fruits and vegetables, each with its distinct shape, texture, and flavor. Such is Jarrett’s post-millennial approach, which finds just as much depth in the self-fulfilling vignette as in the arcing narratives of years past. From heartaching lyricism (Part III) to mystical convolutions (Part IV), elegiac resolutions (Part V) to anthemic revelries (Part VII), the language of contrast is alive and well.

The concert’s most intuitive moments emerge in the latter half, wherein Jarrett makes a landscape audible by touch alone. Part VIII evokes the undulating line of purple hills. Part IX is the campfire at field center and the dancers who make the most of its warmth in the encroaching twilight. The tenth and final improvisation is a culmination of impending forces, a smoothing of wrinkles in the bed sheets of experience that leaves a most pristine surface for slumber.

The strangely satisfying mix of parallels and cross-hatchings one can expect to hear in any Jarrett solo program are all here to be savored, an expectation that bears out naturally for avid listeners, enchantingly for newcomers. Either way, Jarrett seems less interested in surprising anyone—himself least of all—throughout this nonetheless monumental performance. Rather, he bathes in the music’s unfolding as might a child watch clouds go by overhead. What we have, then, are readings of amorphous shapes: faces, figures, and objects that fuse and separate, congeal and dissolve.

Such depths might have been enough, but Jarrett felt it appropriate to append five encores, together an autobiographical compendium that cuts across his career like a knife through cake. Each original layer reveals something true and undying within him. “The Good America” is the sweet icing, beneath which “Paint My Heart Red” beats with a pulsing stratum of fruit. “My Song” references the classic 1978 album of the same name. The enthusiastic applause discloses the surprise of recognition. The audience has been given a gift of long ago, a nostalgic prism that still refracts for all who lend an ear. The downright edible vamp of “True Blues” makes for a rich, chocolaty foundation, while the concert’s only standard, “Time On My Hands,” lights the candles on top, inhales, and lets the ensuing blast of adoration blow them out.

The Carnegie Hall Concert is, of course, just one of many wondrous pieces of an unparalleled archive. Ultimately, comparisons to Jarrett’s influential appearances in Köln, Tokyo, and Milan need not apply. Each is its own animal with unique cadences and features, and together they nurse an ecosystem of timeless ingenuity.

Keith Jarrett: Radiance (ECM 1960/61)

| Tyran Grillo

Radiance

Keith Jarrett
Radiance

Keith Jarrett piano
Radiance, Parts I-XIII
Recorded live, October 27, 2002 at Osaka Festival Hall
Radiance, Parts XIV-XVII
Recorded live, October 30, 2002 at Metropolitan Festival Hall, Tokyo
Engineer: Martin Pearson
Assistant engineer: Yoshihiro Suzuki

“We are all players and we are all being played.”
–Keith Jarrett

Keith Jarrett is a composer without a score, a melody with a body. He is a soul in constant transition. Such is life.

In his liner notes, Jarrett tells us he was trying something new with these solo improvised performances (his first in 15 years after an illness-ridden hiatus), forging paths for the most part devoid of melodic and motivic footholds, and fragmenting the epic journeys for which he’d come to be known. Durations of tracks—ranging from from a minute and a half (Parts IV, XI) to 14 minutes (Parts X, XIV, XVII)—speak to the program’s cellular makeup.

Parts I through XIII are cumulative, in the sense that each could not have existed without the other. Jarrett: “I was slightly shocked to notice that the concert had arranged itself into a musical structure despite my every effort to be oblivious to the overall outcome.” That such structure emerged at all is testament to his soul, which lives and breathes for the communication of his art, and to the music he unearths, all the more everlasting for being unplanned. One can hear him thinking through the notes as if they were words in a James Joyce novel, skimming just enough meaning off the top to tell a story but also leaving behind so much to discover during future listens. Passages of controlled frustration blend into heavenly resolutions, though one is always quick to succumb to the other. This is especially true in Part I, which sets a precedent for open reflection, shuffling honesty into a deck without spades.

Occasional mechanical rhythms (Parts II, VIII, and especially the vampy XII) demonstrate the unpredictability of Newton’s clockwork universe, sometimes digging so deep into the earth that they come out the other side and continue onward toward neighboring galaxies. Reveries, on the other hand, are fragrant and abundant (Parts III, VI, IX, XIII). In these Jarrett wanders like the traveler whose satchel has been emptied of its material artifacts yet which overflows with spiritual relics of the journey that emptied it. He takes in the sights along with the sounds, folds each into his tattered scrapbook, and stores their energy for the next concert. As effective as these snapshots are, even more so are the abstract and beguiling ones. In this respect, the heavily sustain-pedaled Part V is a masterful stretch. Here Jarrett turns the keys into putty and flexes the piano’s infrastructure to a breaking point. Part X, for its breadth and sheer melodic force, is another highlight that combines reverence with fearless distortions.

Parts XIV through XVII are excerpted from the concert recorded in full on ECM’s Tokyo Solo DVD, and demonstrate the vignette-oriented Jarrett to clearest effect. There is playfulness in these concluding acts, a dramaturgy of detail and respect for spontaneous character. So easy are they to get swept up in that the urge to sing along may be almost as strong as that which compels Jarrett to emote in just that way. That song becomes our tether to land as the tidal currents of Part XVII take us back to the Mother Ocean, where swims our shared love for the sounds that kept us from sinking in the first place.

Keith Jarrett Trio: Yesterdays (ECM 2060)

| Tyran Grillo

Yesterdays

Keith Jarrett Trio
Yesterdays

Keith Jarrett piano
Gary Peacock double-bass
Jack DeJohnette drums
Recorded April 30, 2001 at Metropolitan Festival Hall, Tokyo
Engineer: Yoshihiro Suzuki
Produced by Manfred Eicher and Keith Jarrett

Yesterdays follows Always Let Me Go, The Out-of-Towners, and My Foolish Heart (link to all) as the fourth and final ECM album recorded during Keith Jarrett, Gary Peacock, and Jack DeJohnette’s inaugural tour of the new millennium. Like beads on a necklace, these albums guide a singular thread, a development of attitude and polish, which colors the music of this enduring trio. Pianist, bassist, and drummer respectively buff another set of standards to a sheen of crystalline ebullience.

Horace Silver’s “Strollin’” blossoms with free-blowing fragrance, carrying its symbolic weight in gold down pathways toward reminisced-about times and places. Although Jarrett’s wings may be almost as fast as a hummingbird’s, they are living proof of mind over matter, if not mind as matter, doing more than putting feet to ground as the title would imply. Peacock likewise enamors the scene with an emotional rather than physical leap in his solo. “You Took Advantage Of Me” returns from its appearance on My Foolish Heart with even greater sanctity, while the title track, tender as tender can be, holds its heart in its pocket so that it may never forget where it came from. Peacock builds a fluid, chromatic ladder in his duly heartfelt solo before an enchanting finish from the keys. “Shaw’nuff,” a Charlie Parker/Dizzy Gillespie joint, launches into its vamp with the resolve of a high diver. There is fantastic, sparkling energy here that bears out in a concise and to-the-point narrative style. The forlorn ballad “You’ve Changed” works its craft in subtlest ways. Originally a song of needing to move on but not knowing how, here it cups a more hopeful carnation in its hands. Peacock does wonders with this tune, as does Jarrett in the afterglow. Parker’s “Scrapple From The Apple” makes a welcome cameo in the trio’s set list after a debut appearance on up for it and elicits pure trio magic. Harold Arlen’s “A Sleepin’ Bee” is a steady, mid-tempo tune that adds a dose of whimsy to this Tokyo performance. Peacock and DeJohnette sit deep in the pocket, adding copious amounts of fibrillating swing. “Smoke Gets In Your Eyes” is another soft tune which glows like an ember in memory of a doused fire, of the feeling of togetherness that once convened around it. After these blue notes, the upbeat take on “Stella By Starlight” (recorded during soundcheck) that ends the album pours fresh sunshine onto the scene, inspires some fine drumming, and puts Jarrett in a restrained yet joyful mode, ending smoothly and unexpectedly on a whim.

Track for track, a solid outing, with soft spots in all the right places.

(To hear samples of Yesterdays, click here.)

Keith Jarrett Trio: My Foolish Heart (ECM 2021/22)

| Tyran Grillo

My Foolish Heart

Keith Jarrett Trio
My Foolish Heart

Keith Jarrett piano
Gary Peacock double-bass
Jack DeJohnette drums
Recorded July 22, 2001 at Stravinski Auditorium, Montreaux with Le Voyageur Mobile Studio
Engineer: Martin Pearson
Produced by Manfred Eicher

My Foolish Heart may just be, between Still Live and Somewhere, the missing piece of the Keith Jarrett Trio’s Triforce. Recorded live in Montreux in July of 2001, it shows the trio—both in general and this specific—in brightest light. The bounce of “Four” kicks things off with so much panache that anyone even thinking of laying fingers to keyboard might just want to crawl into a hovel and listen in awe. The tune is, of course, by Miles Davis and draws lines of history back to Jarrett’s association with the Prince of Darkness, flipping that nickname into an exercise in luminescence. The feeling of togetherness practically shouts its decades of experience from the rooftops and calls any who will listen in ecstatic gathering. Peacock almost flies off the handle from all the excitation, but reins in his enthusiasm just enough to build his first solo of the night with architectural integrity. DeJohnette, too, revs the engine a few times without losing traction.

This formula works wonders in subsequent takes on Sonny Rollins’s “Oleo” and two Fats Waller tunes (“Ain’t Misbehavin’” and “Honeysuckle Rose”), imbuing the stage, respectively, with flow, flourish, and ragtime charm. At once progressive and nostalgic, these fast-fingered excursions attract wonder like magnets. The emotive genius of Jarrett’s sidemen is extraordinary throughout. “The Song Is You” is another instance of revelry that unpacks entire fields’ worth of implications in single sweeps, in which DeJohnette’s skills blossom most blissfully.

“You Took Advantage Of Me,” a Rogers and Hart show tune, finds a holistic place in the Jarrett set list and obscures none of the whimsy of its absent lyrics. From the florid we move to the tough love of Thelonious Monk’s “Straight, No Chaser,” which pours a stiff drink indeed. Jarrett spins like a top, inspiring gorgeous circling from DeJohnette and a pin-cushioned solo from Peacock. It sits comfortably alongside “Five Brothers,” an earlier Gerry Mulligan tune that oozes 1950s charisma: monochromatic, debonair, and veiled by cigarette smoke. The trio ends somberly with a quietly spirited “Guess I’ll Hang My Tears Out To Dry.” More than any other portion of the concert, Jarrett’s infallible respect for melody comes to the fore and paints for us a picture so realistic, it might as well be a photograph, a moment in time, a memory to cherish.

Two encores further express the trio’s balance of wind and water. “On Green Dolphin Street” whisks on by with such ebullience that it hardly leaves a trace of its passing, while “Only The Lonely” tears the heart in two and mends it in just over six minutes. Yet nowhere is the telepathy of this trio so nakedly conveyed than in the title tune, which sways, full-figured and proud, with all the rustle of a willow tree. The combination of singing pianism and melodic rhythm support hides a perfect scar in its core. There’s a song to be sung here, and its name is: YOU.

Keith Jarrett: Paris/London – Testament (ECM 2130-32)

| Tyran Grillo

Testament

Keith Jarrett
Paris/London – Testament

Keith Jarrett piano
Recorded in concert
November 26, 2008 at Salle Pleyel, Paris
December 1, 2008 at Royal Festival Hall, London
Producer: Keith Jarrett
Engineer: Martin Pearson
Executive producer: Manfred Eicher

“Communication is all. Being is all.”
–Keith Jarrett

Since the release of his endlessly influential live record The Köln Concert, Keith Jarrett has done more than any other at the keyboard to clarify improvisation’s infinite shape. When basking in the music that pours from his fingertips, it’s easy to wax poetically from one’s armchair about the effortless brilliance with which he seems to play. Yet Jarrett wants us to know that the process is not all intuition, for often—as is true of the concerts documented here—the physical and emotional challenges are intense, unrelenting. In his liner notes, he lays out the taxing nature of his efforts, saying, “It is NOT natural to sit at a piano, bring no material, clear your mind completely of musical ideas, and play something that is of lasting value and brand new.” He further mentions that the role of the audience has always been of the “utmost chemical importance” and is more apt to change the dynamics of the performance than any technical concerns, such as those that permeate the lore of Köln. Whether it’s a concert hall, a microphone, or the ether itself, every adlib needs an ear.

On November 26, 2008, Jarrett put this theory into practice when he took the stage at Salle Pleyel in Paris for the first of two ad hoc solo concerts. Although a noticeably bipolar performance, it also draws many intersections of contact between extremes. Over a glorious 70 minutes of music in eight parts, Jarrett works an asana of fixation and letting go and touches hand to heart in sporadic gestures of deference. Like water set to boil but which is turned down at the last moment, it skirts the edge of conversion from liquid to gas. At some moments Jarrett’s spontaneous motifs funnel into a single dream of flight, realized in his unbridled feeling for thermals that only he can see. Such depth is palpable in Parts III and VIII, both of which make sweeping peace of untapped wisdom, now opened like a book to reveal an as-yet-unwritten past. With every shake of the snow globe, Jarrett seeks new patterns. Whether in the mournful procession of Part V or the jazzier syncopations of VI, we can feel a working-through that gnaws the edges of philosophy. The final section synthesizes what came before. At once elegiac and scintillating, it finishes with a deluge of ephemeral signifiers.

The London concert, recorded five days later, is clothed by even more intense variety. One can not only hear but feel the debates raging inside Jarrett, who with Part I renders the rib cage a ladder to radiance and catches an eddying wind in Part II, kicking up leaves and dry soil. In this concert, too, the sheer breadth of Jarrett’s sweep is staggering in a way rarely heard since the early concerts. From Part III to the concluding XII, every step of this journey flirts with optimism, though gnarled eyes mark the wood grain periodically along the way. Gospel progressions infuse spiritual longing with living resolution, fingers digging into every chord like hands into soil, while Parts VII and X vamp across vales of blues. In likeminded vein, Parts IV and VIII hark to the divine tracings of Köln in some of his most unmitigated playing since that fateful performance. Sparkling and transcendent, they cascade over themselves in a constant rebirthing process. This is what lies at the heart of his craft: a total oneness with the elements. It’s like discovering the inner workings of a clock you once believed ran on magic, only to realize that in those gears lies the deeper magic of the ingenuity that set them running.

No such program would be complete without some jazzier flashpoints, and these we get in Parts VI and XI, both of which feel like ballads lost from the American Songbook that have wandered into view after a long redemption. Though haggard, they convey perseverance through their melodies. Close to elegies but ultimately wishes fulfilled, they touch with a caress that feels like mountains and sky.

Most impressive about the Paris and London concerts is their scope. Jarrett’s hands wander independently of one another while also keeping at least an artery pulsing between them. Jarrett knows the piano like he knows his own voice; for him they are one and the same. He does not surrender to what he creates, for surrender implies an advantage of which to be taken. The beauty of it all is that one need listen only once to live off the memory for a lifetime.

(To hear samples of Paris/London – Testament, click here.)

Keith Jarrett Trio: The Out-of-Towners (ECM 1900)

| Tyran Grillo

The Out-of-Towners

Keith Jarrett Trio
The Out-of-Towners

Keith Jarrett piano
Gary Peacock double-bass
Jack DeJohnette drums
Recorded live July 28, 2001 at State Opera, Munich
Engineer: Martin Pearson
Mastering: Morten Lund, Masterhuset
Produced by Manfred Eicher

With the insight of legitimate hypnotists, Keith Jarrett and his trio regress seven tunes with a flair for the unexpected. Recorded live at Munich’s State Opera in July of 2001, an especially productive year for the band, the performance whispers into life with a piano intro before waxing nostalgic in a sunny rendition of “I Can’t Believe That You’re In Love With Me.” Jarrett, of course, shines at every turn, but his phenomenal rhythm section has rarely sounded more luminescent. Light in their step and playful in their virtuosity, Jarrett’s sidemen exude effortlessness. Peacock is worth singling out in this opening tune, in which he departs from his usual twang in favor of a smoother, subtler extroversion. He reverts to his tried and true in a rendition of “You’ve Changed” that turns to melted butter in the trio’s hands. With Jarrett’s delicate anchorage behind him, the bassist picks away at edifice of the song’s confusion to a core of resolve. Jarrett pours on the honey for the rejoinder, DeJohnette all the while brushing like the wings of a dying insect, swishing to the rhythm of a broken heart. Brushes turn to cymbals in an effervescent take on Cole Porter’s “I Love You,” which finds the drummer running a parallel course of emotional freedom alongside Jarrett. Artful solos abound.

The freely improvised title cut is a gem. Over its 20-minute vamp, the trio plays with such looseness that it can only cohere by sheer depth of listening. Peacock is the conductor of this epic train, DeJohnette adding dynamite charge to the rails throughout the ride. The follow-up is a crystalline “Five Brothers.” This tune by the great Gerry Mulligan is the very definition of smooth. Jarrett’s punch and charisma here exhaust the barriers around his concluding solo, a heart-stilling rendering of “It’s All In The Game.” Thus sworn by sunset, he walks into a darkening horizon, where rests the origins of these gifts, so selflessly given, which like the figures on the album’s cover are almost gone from view the moment we realize they were within us all along.

Terje Rypdal: Lux Aeterna (ECM 1818)

| Tyran Grillo

Lux Aeterna

Terje Rypdal
Lux Aeterna

Terje Rypdal guitar
Palle Mikkelborg trumpet
Iver Kleive church organ
Åshild Stubø Gundersen soprano
Bergen Chamber Ensemble
Kjell Seim conductor
Recorded live July 19, 2000 at Molde Domkirke
Recording engineer: Jan Erik Kongshaug
Album produced by Manfred Eicher

Regarding the modern Lux Aeterna (Eternal light), György Ligeti’s setting of the Latin text comes foremost to mind. Made famous by way of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (incidentally, my first exposure to Ligeti’s music), it did, of course, through that association take on cosmic aspects that may or may not have been originally intended. Although Ligeti was an earlier influence on Norwegian guitarist-composer Terje Rypdal’s take recorded here, the latter’s mapping processes are as distant as the faintest star. It is a setting in the truest sense, nesting one vocal movement among four others in a large-scale work that defies idiomatic description.

The first movement, subtitled “Luminous Galaxy,” is a serenade to the universe. Rypdal’s epic arranging skills and attention to color clear the sky of all pollution and distraction, leaving a naked belt, a cleft in the chin of darkness. The strings of the Bergen Chamber Ensemble (under the direction of Kjell Seim) reach heavenward even as their intentions burrow into the soil, spreading fingers and toes in pursuit of a shared, nameless goal. A celeste adds handfuls of stardust to the palette. Palle Mikkelborg then takes to the stage, almost startling in his surety. Warmed by the horse-haired fire around him, his echo-processed trumpet describes a vaulted architecture, of which windows and doors are galaxies unto themselves. The dialogic relationship established here at the outset encompasses so much space that the bulk of existence seems within reach. Swaying key changes mimic the flapping of a dress in the wind, the swirl of Jupiter’s eye, the quiet circumscription of Saturn’s rings. Through it all, the light of many suns coalesces in planetary alignment. And then, another entrance as a church organ (played by Iver Kleive) throws all satellite transmissions into paroxysms of static with its volcanic breath. It looses a subterranean call, rumbling more than singing, and bows in a gesture so luminous that only the pitch of night can contain it.

Rypdal explains the meaning behind “Fjelldåpen” (Baptized by the mountains): “For some reason now forgotten I wanted to teach my parents a lesson. I was 9 or 10 years old. I found a track used by sheep—very steep—and climbed the mountain fast. Once on top for a while I felt a very special connection to the mountain (and still do). At first I felt quite brave, but then a forceful wind started to scare me. And this feeling I’ve tried to capture in the second movement—you can hear when the wind is coming.” Rypdal goes on to say that he came down from the mountain to find that nobody had missed him: the world had gone on turning without him. The profundity of this realization at such a young age—the knowledge that one may be nothing more than an arbitrary arrangement of dark matter—is captured achingly in the composer’s lonely electric guitar as it leaves a trail of fuel to the mountain’s apex. Only when he surveys his achievement does he hold his axe to the sunset and light that trail with its fire. And as the world goes up in flames and licks the sky with its profound indifference, Rypdal shreds, balancing his trademark melodic lasers with the mercury of their fragmentation. His feet lift from the peak and float him beyond the clouds.

Hence the third movement, “Escalator.” Here the strings flow unlike earthly water, moving from land to mountain: a return to origins. Mikkelborg makes a subtle return. Spilling from a caesura in the very firmament, the trumpet liquefies and returns to a solid state in the musician’s hands, already itching with muscle memory to coat the landscape with elliptical grammar.

The fourth movement, “Toccata,” is an interlude for organ that twists the frame until all beings expire as they are, leaving only ruins behind. There, beneath tattered banners and dilapidated thrones, before the corpses of servants and skeleton-inhabited armor, a wordless sermon emerges with the force of a jumping spider. Distant flutes sing the praises of an idyllic age, when maidens and warriors needed no excuse to weep for love. This luxury of beauty plays out tearfully in the windowless corridor of this most titanic of instruments.

The titular movement ends the work with the voice of soprano Åshild Stubø Gundersen, introduced in points of contact and unison with electric guitar. Gundersen is captivating in her fallible tone, whereby she reveals the imperfections that make outer space such a ageless vessel for fascination. The difference between media blurs over time, so that Rypdal and the singer emote on almost exactly the same wavelength. The relationship between throat and pick feels entirely organic, less a shift between than a transfusion from one sonic entity to another. The organ sustains a drone and drops single notes like the signal tones in Close Encounters of the Third Kind—only here, the answer comes from within, from the trumpet (the messenger of peace), from the very rhythms of the heart by which all things cohere and expand. Descending chords—a recurring motif in Rypdal’s classically minded outings—leave their footprints clearly in mind. Thus spent, the densest matter spins into diffusion, leaving only the core theme intact, billiard-struck toward a black hole, silent and waiting.