Jazz

Ketil Bjørnstad: The Light (ECM 2056)

| Tyran Grillo

The Light

The Light

Randi Stene mezzo-sopran
Lars Anders Tomter viola
Ketil Bjørnstad piano
Recorded February/March 2007 at Rainbow Studio, Oslo
Engineer: Jan Erik Kongshaug
Mixed by Jan Erik Kongshaug, Ketil Bjørnstad, and Manfred Eicher
Produced by Manfred Eicher

“Longing itself is a pledge that what we long for exists.”
–Karen Blixen

Ketil Bjørnstad has left a nuanced yet indelible trail through ECM’s forest, leading to the beacon that is The Light. The more he creates, the less ornamental his music becomes, so that here we have distilled melodies and grander human themes that can breathe. Subtitled “Songs Of Love And Fear,” this album is essentially his second for the label as nominal leader, following 1993’s Water Stories. And while many subsequent collaborations, including his classic sessions among the “Sea” quartet (with David Darling, Terje Rypdal, and Jon Christensen), have rendered water his theme par excellence, now he treads the currents of an equally fundamental force of life.

As any Bjørnstad listener knows, the Norwegian pianist and composer has always had a flair for clear and evocative melodies, and fans will surely find their expectations well met in this album’s two song cycles. The strength of this record, then, lies in its personnel. Bringing new depth to the Bjørnstad aesthetic are singer Randi Stene’s and violinst Lars Anders Tomter, the second of whom adds a dash of reality to the dreamlike qualities of the piano-voice telos. Indeed, these songs would seem to reference the great lieder of European art music in spirit, albeit by means of a more translucent architecture.

Bjørnstad’s Fire Nordiske Sanger (Four Nordic Songs) represent three decades of writing, performing, and refinement. It is, perhaps, no coincidence that the Norwegian word for “four” should mimic the English “fire,” for that is indeed the type of inner glow brought to every verse. The personal feel of “Grensen” (The Border) sets the tone. Written for his wife’s 50th birthday in 2006, it is the most recent of the four songs and reads like a love letter. “Sommernatt Ved Fjorden” (By The Fjord), on the other hand, was written in 1978 and has since become, much to the composer’s surprise, a favorite on the Norwegian pop charts. Imagistic contrasts also abound, as between the rustically inflected “Natten” (The Night), in which the viola takes on a narrative role, and the cinematic “Sommersang” (Summer Song), which follows the emotions of its protagonist—the song was, in fact, written for Stene—with the precision of a tracking shot.

The album’s remainder and title piece sets eleven poems by John Donne (1572-1631). While the vagueness of Donne’s poetry has always been key to its appeal, here it is leveled by the music’s even keel, balancing absence with substance and stillness with life.

In songs like “A Valediction: Of Weeping,” “The Dream,” and “The Prohibition,” the words teeter between surrender and command, while in “Air And Angels,” “Love’s Alchemy,” and “Break Of Day,” love assaults the eyes like two transparencies of the same image bumped slightly askew. Nevertheless, the connective spirit of Bjørnstad and Tomter holds on to a vision of unity in the shadow of Stene’s voice, especially in their instrumental interlude, “Lamentoso.”

Moments of unity abound elsewhere. “The Flea” is both one of Donne’s most intriguing poems and receives here an equally vivid melodic treatment. “A Nocturnal Upon St. Lucy’s Day, Being The Shortest Day” is a morsel of comparable skill, weighted by the pall of a long winter, that finds its renunciations answered in “The Sun Rising,” in which rooted pianism evokes the grip of Donne’s passions. Finally, “A Hymn To God The Father” points to the poet’s devout core, where faith in heavenly blessing wraps his fears of death until they dissolve. This is where the album’s light truly shines through, exploring through prayer a love secluded from a world that would pick it clean if given the chance.

Tsabropoulos/Lechner/Gandhi: Melos (ECM 2048)

| Tyran Grillo

Melos

Melos

Vassilis Tsabropoulos piano
Anja Lechner violoncello
U. T. Gandhi percussion
Recorded June 2007, Auditorio Radio Svizzera
Engineer: Stefano Amerio
Produced by Manfred Eicher

The second album from Greek pianist Vassilis Tsabropoulos and German cellist Anja Lechner, would seem to be a sequel to Chants, Hymns and Dances, but is in many ways a restructuring of that same cosmos rather than a parallel universe to it. The music of G. I. Gurdjieff again provides the heliocenter around which the compositions of Tsabropoulos and fragments of Byzantine hymns coalesce into planets and satellites, respectively. Drummer U. T. Gandhi, making his sophomore ECM appearance following his label debut with the Dino Saluzzi Group on Juan Condori, adds new colors to the project.

The title of Melos refers to the arrangement of notes into a discernible tune (hence: melody), and in this respect its contents succeed beautifully. The title track starts the album with an all-encompassing embrace. Lechner navigates Tsabropoulos’s delicate ostinato in such a way that, even as the pianist continues exploring the ripple effect of her measured silence, when the cello reprises the theme, it does so newly fortified with sacred energy. This feeling of chant, meditation, and return suffuses all that follows, so that mellower songs (for that is indeed what they are) and livelier dances become yin and yang to the program’s overall equilibrium. At its most heartbreakingly lyrical, as in the two so-called “Songs Of Prosperity” and “Song Of Gratitude,” the music retains a bright antiphony throughout. Even “Simplicity,” a piano solo of great solemnity, shines with life force.

Tsabropoulos’s notes often rise like smoke from the swinging censer of Lechner’s bowing, growing especially animated in “Reflections” and its counterpart, “Reflections And Shadows.” At around two minutes each, these lively miniatures compresses an entire history’s worth of joy into vibrant, spinning cores. Such characterization holds truer in the trios, where Gandhi’s contributions feel wedded to every underlying impulse. His cymbals crest ebony waves in the exquisite “Gift Of Dreams,” expand to a broader percussive palette in “Promenade,” and attain broadest harmony in the jazzier “Vocalise.” For “Tibetan Dance,” the first of three strategically positioned Gurdjieff tunes, he adds a distinctly soft touch, and likewise imbues “Sayyid Dance” with the delicate propulsion of a Manu Katché joint. “Reading From A Sacred Book,” on the other hand, unfurls a percussionless banner, pointing to Keith Jarrett’s own reading on the seminal Sacred Hymns, making it all the more appropriate that the present album should end with the title “In Memory,” in which is encoded a shaded smile of gratitude.

The atmosphere of Melos should be of particular interest to fans of The Sea and, even more so, The River. Not because this album has a particularly aquatic feel, but because its combination of sounds and textures yields comparable atmosphere. In addition to its clarity of engineering, Melos is notable for the ordering of its tracks. Just when the music becomes too pretty, it recedes into a shadow or twisted cavern (cf. “Evocation”), where it meditates on the irregularities of life and this fragile world supporting them.

(To hear samples of Melos, click here.)

Norma Winstone Trio: Distances (ECM 2028)

| Tyran Grillo

Norma Winstone Trio
Distances

Norma Winstone voice
Glauco Venier piano
Klaus Gesing bass clarinet, soprano saxophone
Recorded April 2007 Artesuono Recording Studios, Udine
Engineer: Stefano Amerio
Supervision: Guido Gorna
Editing and mixing: Stefano Amerio and Manfred Eicher
Produced by Manfred Eicher

German reedist Klaus Gesing and Italian pianist Glauco Venier join the ECM roster for the first time in an astonishing trio album with veteran singer and lyricist Norma Winstone. Whereas in her past efforts for the label Winstone used her voice as much as a melodic tool as an agent of song, here she steeps the listener in a richly textured feeling not experienced since her 1987 masterpiece, Somewhere Called Home.

“Distance” sets the stage not only thematically, but also musically. The tune is by Venier, whose gentle ostinato exudes an atmosphere that is as weightless as Winstone’s lyrics are gravid. The whispers of Gesing’s bass clarinet complete this portrait of a subterranean world run dry. A prologue to an album of prologues.

Venier further pens “Gorizia” and “The Mermaid.” The former is a halting and wordless waltz that dissolves like ink in water, while the latter is another lyrical bird’s nest. Winstone and Gesing respectively provide words and music for “Drifter” and “Giant’s Gentle Stride,” both adaptive verses that sweep through the composer’s gorgeous reed work with ease. Winstone deepens the circle in “Remembering The Start Of A Never Ending Story,” set to the music of pianist Hubert Nuss. What begins as a play of light and glass finds solace through the soprano’s wide-flung window. In the haunting “Ciant,” Winstone sings words by Italian director Pier Paolo Pasolini to the tune of Erik Satie’s Petite Ouverture à danser, the peaks and valleys of which become interchangeable, each the yin to the other’s yang.

Winstone and her telepathic trio also reverse-engineer popular songs to an elemental sort of understanding. The Cole Porter chestnut “Every Time We Say Goodbye,” for one, pairs her and Gesing’s soprano to stunning effect. Moving like wings in concert, the duo reads the wind as Venier follows their birdlike shadow. Their version of Peter Gabriel’s “Here Comes The Flood” shines even brighter. Against a backdrop of palpable color, its celestial interpretations and earthly ruminations combine with the precision of a chamber music ensemble.

Finishing off the album’s eclectic stride is “A Song for England,” which finds the trio improvising on a Caribbean calypso, with words by Jamaican-born writer Andrew Salkey. The bass clarinet’s rhythmic support buoys a purely melodic Winstone before switching over to discernible lyric amid a shower of whimsy.

Distances is an album one wishes could go on and on. That said, its compactness offers plenty to rediscover on repeat listening. Combinations like this happen only rarely, and Winstone’s puzzle comes out of the box completed, glued together, and glowing with atmosphere. Hers is a voice that sings not because it must be heard by the world, but because it must itself hear the world. It speaks only of what it has known.

The Dowland Project: Night Sessions (ECM New Series 2018)

| Tyran Grillo

Night Sessions

The Dowland Project
Night Sessions

John Potter tenor
John Surman saxophones, bass clarinet, percussion
Stephen Stubbs lute, chitarrone, baroque guitar, vihuela
Maya Homburger violin
Miloš Valent violin, viola
Barry Guy double bass
Recorded September 2001 and January 2006, Propstei St. Gerold
Engineer: Markus Heiland
Produced by Manfred Eicher

The Dowland Project was the brainchild of former Hilliard Ensemble tenor John Potter, and had before this album’s release lulled listeners over the course of three traversals: In Darkness Let Me Dwell, Care-charming sleep, and Romaria. As the story goes, after shedding its light in the middle recording, the Project returned to the studio at producer Manfred Eicher’s unexpected behest. Thus the night sessions documented herein were born, in and of the moment.

With Potter are reedist John Surman, lutenist Stephen Stubbs, violinists Maya Homburger and Miloš Valent (by turns), and bassist Barry Guy. Together they forge a sigil of such intuitive, adaptive power that the texts treated here come alive in new and evocative ways. Of those texts, Potter selected a wide assortment, reading them aloud to the group before giving each a onetime go. Improvising around both familiar and adlibbed tunes, the musicians drew their individual lines with such openness that only a bold stripe of unrepeatable music making was left behind. Following that line as listeners after the fact is half the fun. Imagining what it might have been like to be a fly on the wall at Austria’s Monastery of Sankt Gerold, where the sounds were captured for posterity, is the other.

The songs span a range of eras and moods, but all with a twinge of heart that only a troubadour’s pen can elucidate. In that vein, the 12th-century “Can vei la lauzeta mover” by Bernart de Ventadorn yields some of the album’s richest musical textures. Although Potter is the focus, Guy (especially when in conversation with Homburger) proves to be another defining voice. Potter’s own is the horizon line between extremes, while Surman’s soprano saxophone is achingly present, a trail of firefly light running through the darkness.

Sources run the gamut from Portuguese pilgrim song (“Menino Jesus à Lappa”) to Byzantine chant (“Theoleptus 22”). Whether cracking like parchment in the Middle English lyric of “Man in the moon,” clanging like the blacksmith’s hammer in the anonymous 15th-century “Swart mekerd smethes,” or luxuriating in the delicate unabashed descriptiveness of “Whistling in the dark,” Potter navigates all of it with a conscious comfort and playfulness of spirit. Notables include the early 16th-century carol “Corpus Christi” and the 14th-century “Fumeux fume,” the latter by the recherché French composer Solage. Both pair Potter with Surman’s bass clarinet, while the second adds Guy’s upright. Also intriguing are “Mystery play,” in which Potter occupies a back corner of the studio, and “I sing of a maiden,” another Middle English lyric that is by far the most haunting on the album.

Instrumental pieces sprinkled throughout lend reflective prowess to the program’s flow. Two improvised “triages” make contrasts of dance and shadow, while the rest put the lute of Stubbs to full effect, whether in his own improvisations or in the works of Joan Ambrosio Dalza (fl. 1508) and Pierre Attaignant (1494-1551/52). His soloing provides anchorage for the more complex spider’s filament strung between. He also ends the album as tenderly as he begins, with Attaignant’s “Prelude”: an indication of things yet to come, of dreams yet to be dreamed.

It must be said that every musician of Night Sessions is as much a singer as Potter’s voice is an instrument. They’re all storytellers, finding order in chaos, plucking pearls from historical oysters, forgotten in oceans long unswum.

Terje Rypdal: Crime Scene (ECM 2041)

| Tyran Grillo

Crime Scene

Terje Rypdal
Crime Scene

Terje Rypdal electric guitar
Palle Mikkelborg trumpet
Ståle Storløkken Hammond B-3 organ
Paolo Vinaccia drums, sampling
Bergen Big Band
Olav Dale conductor
Recorded May 2009 at Nattjazz, Bergen by Norsk Rikskringkasting
Engineer: Per Ravnaas
Produced by Erling Wicklund

A line from The Good, the Bad and the Ugly plunges us into the world of Terje Rypdal’s Crime Scene: “Since we’re all going in the same direction, we might as well go together.” The fruit of a commission for the 2009 Nattjazz Festival in Bergen, Norway, the album is both a departure and a homecoming. In the former sense, it puts the Norwegian guitarist-composer’s pen to the 17-piece Bergen Big Band; latterly it deploys the rawness of his electric guitar into a mounting energy field. Joining him on the main stage are trumpeter Palle Mikkelborg, drummer Paolo Vinaccia, and Ståle Storløkken on Hammond B-3 organ, all under the baton of Olav Dale. The cinematic charge of such forces is brought home by Vinaccia’s tasteful, if unabashed, sampling of classic Hollywood westerns, gangster pictures, and films noirs.

Rypdal’s long-range suite erects a ghost town of familiar voices: Clint Eastwood’s Blondie, Marlon Brando’s Don Corleone, and even (surprisingly?) Christopher Lloyd’s Doc Brown add their own grit and wit to an appropriately gravelly undercurrent. Much has been made about the use of samples in this otherwise muscled sonic experience, but these popular sound bites provide anchorage for the music’s spiraling outcomes. In regard to those outcomes Rypdal gives us tantalizing clues by way of tongue-in-cheek track titles like “Prime Suspects,” “The Criminals,” and “Investigation.” Throughout this course in aural detection we encounter dueling tenors (both instrumental and emotional) and a trio of bass clarinets, the undercurrent of Storløkken’s Hammond stoking the furnace all the while. Mikkelborg often echoes Miles Davis (a major influence on Rypdal’s earliest fusional stirrings) as the rhythm section’s grungy airlock holds its own against a tide of brass. Through this Rypdal’s guitar cuts—not a knife but a siren, breaking the seal on a bag of forensic evidence with sheer force of thought.

As referential as Crime Scene is to its thematic bon mots, it is even more so to Rypdal’s own career and inspirations. Head-nodding bass lines recall What Comes After and Odyssey, scalding the night with their nostalgia. The ambient collage of “Parli con me?!” and hard-hitting funk of “Action” (a prime vehicle for Rypdal the acrobat) rest comfortably between composite sketches of horns. And the darker “It’s Not Been Written Yet” leads to the even darker conclusion of “Crime Solved,” the low drone of which burrows into the skull in a way not heard since Q.E.D.

Crime Scene belongs to that sparsely populated league of such montage procedurals as John Zorn’s masterful Spillane. Although it may not puff as many cigarettes as Zorn’s exemplar, it nevertheless swims in its fair share of smoke.

(To hear samples of Crime Scene, click here.)

Ralph Towner/Paolo Fresu: Chiaroscuro (ECM 2085)

| Tyran Grillo

Chiaroscuro

Chiaroscuro

Ralph Towner classical, 12-string and baritone guitars
Paolo Fresu trumpet, flugelhorn
Recorded October 2008 at Artesuono Recording Studio, Udine
Engineer: Stefano Amerio
Produced by Manfred Eicher

Ralph Towner describes his first encounter with Paolo Fresu at a festival in Sardinia: “I didn’t know him at all then, but from the very first phrase that he played, I thought: This guy really understands melodies!” Surely, we can say the same about both musicians once the first bars of “Wistful Thinking” lay the corner pieces of the ensuing puzzle, establishing with them a language of tasteful ornament. If the overall effect feels nostalgic, it’s because the track reprises material from Open Letter, an even more unusual pairing that found Towner in the company of drummer Peter Erskine. Another, “Zephyr,” was last heard on Oregon’s Ecotopia and shows in this duo version an even barer creative process at work.

Towner and Fresu

More to the point, Chiaroscuro is an album of balanced architecture, each tune an archway held strong by a melodic keystone. The title track, for one, turns like a windmill in April, sprouting with fractal energy that integrates the musicians in the same way that light and shadow dance in the cover photograph. There is always something of one in the other, even in the solo passages. Whether navigating Miles Davis’s undying “Blue In Green” (the only non-Towner piece of the program) or the propulsive “Punta Giara,” the dance of Towner’s earth tones and Fresu’s hints of sunrise maintains a robust meridian.

The guitarist’s rhythms are so compact that it’s refreshing to hear a partner drawing melodic threads through them without getting buried. In “Doubled Up” especially, Towner’s busy fingerwork would seem to shelter no room for interpretation, yet finds harmony in the trumpeter’s muted approach. Deeper still are the contrasts of “Sacred Place,” a chromatic solo piece from Towner that finds haunting reprise with Fresu’s unforced elaborations. These three tracks also make use of the baritone guitar, a low-tuned instrument new to Towner’s toolkit.

For balance (in both content and form), a dash of improvisations rounds out the session, slinging Fresu high above Towner’s incandescent 12-string. Pliant yet unflinching in its integrity, this is music that is organic by design.

Quercus: s/t (ECM 2276)

| Tyran Grillo

2276 X

Quercus

June Tabor voice
Huw Warren piano
Iain Ballamy saxophones
Recorded live March 2006 by Paul Sparrow
Edited by Mike Mower
Mixed at Rainbow Studio, Oslo by Jan Erik Kongshaug and Manfred Eicher
Produced by Manfred Eicher, Iain Ballamy, and Huw Warren

Quercus names both the debut album and trio composed of folksinger June Tabor, pianist Huw Warren, and saxophonist Iain Ballamy. The word is Latin for “oak,” but the image implies more than rootedness, embodying the full arboreal essence of this somber collection. Indeed, Tabor’s voice is the very wood of the forest, and invites the instrumentalists along its democratic path of music making.

Quercus Photo

All that I have endured
Lassie my dearie
Here in thine arms is cured
Lassie lie near me

These words, by Scotland’s national poet Robert Burns, ease us into a running theme: love as a salve for all ills. From the last line comes the title of the song, which Tabor sings with little affectation, save the emotional veracity of her diction, while Ballamy harmonizes, doubles, and cradles her by turns. He and Warren carry on the melody, unraveling finer implications behind the text with understated precision. This formula proves effective hereafter and works especially well in the iambic pentameter of Shakespeare’s “Twelfth Night,” from which is excerpted the lyrics of “Come Away Death,” in Ballamy’s own arrangement, and for which Tabor digs into her chest voice to tease out the Bard of Avon’s gravelly truths. It is a quality she employs selectively, as in her unaccompanied version of “Brigg Fair,” turning a normally airy song into ash. Ballamy further provides music for “Near But Far Away,” in which he seems to channel jazz legend Charles Lloyd in this melodious, if cautionary, tale that is one of the album’s finest. “As I Roved Out” completes the selection of traditional songs. Like a fantasy made actual and turned back into fantasy, its scrim bears the scars of transformation:

And at night when I go to my bed of slumber
The thoughts of my true love run in my mind
When I turn around to embrace my darling
Instead of gold sure it’s brass I find

“The Lads In Their Hundreds” couches the WWI poem by A. E. Housman in music of English composer George Butterworth. With the austerity of a Ken Loach film, it draws black where only green once thrived. The musicianship brings an eerie sense of calm and offsets morose imagery of young soldiers going off to war, only to die as anonymous placeholders of unwritten glory. To this elegy Warren responds with “Teares.” The John Dowland-inspired piano solo blends pointillism and sustain, for all a windswept pasture. Subsequent vignettes evoke faraway deserts (“Who Wants The Evening Rose”), the naïveté of love’s first kiss (“This Is Always”) and, in “A Tale From History (The Shooting),” the drama of remembrance. The latter, a true song of songs, features words and music by Irish singer-songwriter David Ballantine. Tales from history line our breath, goes the rhyme. Start with passion, end in death. The promise of retribution lingering in these mor(t)al variations finds fulfillment in the closing “All I Ask Of You,” by American spiritual leader and hymnist Gregory Norbet. Here Ballamy’s introductory soliloquy strikes a balance of prosody and poetry, and holds on to its melody as one in prayer might grasp a rosary. The flowing changes in instrumental color unexpectedly come together with Tabor in the final moments, oneness above all.

Like the three Robin Williamson discs before it, Quercus expands ECM’s unique interpretive folk niche. Although recorded live at The Anvil in Basingstoke in conclusion of a 2006 UK tour, it wasn’t released until 2013. The seven-year lag seems appropriate, for the trio had been together seven years before turning the microphones on. It’s as if the songs were doubly aged so that they might reach our ears at peak flavor and consistency, pushing us along the way into the darkest crannies of the human experience even as they lift us from those depths in want of light. Each is the shadow within the shadow, a space where dreams and realities intermingle until one cannot be pulled apart from the other.

(See this article as it originally appeared in RootsWorld online magazine, where you may also hear a sample track.)

Sinikka Langeland: Starflowers (ECM 1996)

| Tyran Grillo

Starflowers

Sinikka Langeland
Starflowers

Sinikka Langeland vocal, kantele
Arve Henriksen trumpet
Trygve Seim tenor and soprano saxophones
Anders Jormin double-bass
Markku Ounaskari percussion
Recorded May 2006 at Rainbow Studio, Oslo
Engineer: Jan Erik Kongshaug
Produced by Manfred Eicher

It is one of those nights
when loneliness stands with its back turned to everything
and its face frozen fast in the western sky.

“Starflowers” is both an apt name for Sinikka Langeland’s ECM debut and for the cast assembled beneath its canopy. The Norwegian vocalist and kantele (Finnish table harp) player welcomes trumpeter Arve Henriksen, saxophonist Trygve Seim, bassist Anders Jormin, and percussionist Markku Ounaskari for her original settings of verses by lumberjack-poet Hans Børli (1918-1989). Although classically trained, Langeland has nurtured a longstanding interest in folk music. This disc takes that interest into crucible, concentrating it into a melodic cosmology all her own. That Jan Garbarek was an early influence should come as no surprise, for the same mystical undercurrents that inform his own music are undeniably present in hers (refer especially to Mari Boine’s appearances with the saxophonist’s eponymous Group).

Sinikka
(Photo by Dag Alveng)

That said, Langeland is possessed of a voice and touch like no other. The latter, as fed through her five-octave concert kantele (different from the one pictured above) is striking enough to preclude the need for voice. Like the Japanese shō or Constantinople lyra, it’s one of those instruments that seems handed down from on high, left to sing of a homeland to which it can never return. It spins an earthy web as well, shimmering with the pliancy of water but the strength of trees. So preaches the album’s first song, “Høstnatt på Fjellskogen” (Autumn Night in the Mountain Woods), in which Langeland paints entire scenes with a caress of the strings, warping their sound to suit a dreamlike cast. It’s as if the words pull at her, and we hear their pull in every pitch-bent note. The forest is palpable.

Although Børli may rightly be considered a naturalist poet, he was not entirely unaware of the workaday world:

The earth seems to climb and climb,
Lifting into the sky.
Then suddenly there’s calm.
As when the elevator halts
Somewhere on the higher floors and
you take instinctively a backward step
to keep your balance.

Such analogizing only serves his commitment to the outdoors, where his imagery finds common home. Whether chipped away in “Saltstein” (Rock Salt) or emerging from the brushed snare and ghostly bassing of “Sus i myrull” (Whispers in the Cotton Grass) in Meredith Monk-like song-speech, a feeling of rootedness reigns. And in “Langt innpå skoga” (Deep in the Woods), a scrim of frost clings to Langeland’s raw voice, reflecting jazzier denouements from Seim and Ounaskari that speak of urban climes far in the distance.

“Stjernestund” (A Moment of Stars) and “Treet som vekser opp-ned” (The Tree That Grows Upside Down) take on a decidedly mystical air. Cosmic percussion in the one gives life through primal contact, while the other indulges in the power of progression. Both grow in tangled vines, fanciful yet sure as sun and sky. The scintillating quality never weakens. Like the titular instrument of “Den lille fløyten” (The Little Flute), its potential waits for the right person to come along and share it. Even stronger album highlights include “Det er ei slik natt” (It Is One of Those Nights), which features Langeland’s lone voice against the aurora borealis of Jormin’s harmonics, and “Elghjertet” (The Moose Heart), which tells of the same thrown steaming into the snow after a hunt. The heart is covered before the cutting of the carcass is done, left forgotten, cooling to crimson ice.

The album’s three instrumentals are sacred in their own light. “Sølv” (Silver) and “Støv” (Dust) explore likeminded ostinatos, glistening and true. The jazzier “Vindtreet” finds Langeland contributing wordless vocals as the band ventures into its freest territories settling into the quiet sheen and shimmer of strings. All roads, then, lead to “Har du lyttet til elvene om natta?” (Have You Listened to the Rivers in the Night?), where Seim’s soprano and Jormin’s bass embrace a rift of kantele in the rock. The river between them is at once artery and vein. The music builds with urgency, but looses every fish caught back into current. In the wake of their sudden departure, a heat distortion breathes like a church organ fading into sleep.

If you listen long to the rivers in the night,
listen long,
it is at last as if your soul
is mysteriously remembering its future.

François Couturier: Nostalghia – Song for Tarkovsky (ECM 1979)

| Tyran Grillo

Nostalghia

François Couturier
Nostalghia – Song for Tarkovsky

François Couturier piano
Anja Lechner violoncello
Jean-Marc Larché soprano saxophone
Jean-Louis Matinier accordion
Recorded December 2005, Auditorium Radio Svizzera, Lugano
Engineer: Markus Heiland
Produced by Manfred Eicher

“What kind of world is this if a madman tells you you must be ashamed of yourselves? Music now!”

So espouses Erland Josephson as Domenico in Andrei Tarkovsky’s 1983 masterpiece Nostalghia, of which this album by pianist François Couturier takes the name. Domenico is, in many ways, himself a musical figure. As the very madman he admonishes, one who shackled his family in their own home for seven years as protection against an imperfect world, he is constantly refolding his own psyche in a leitmotif of fixation, building reality from blocks of fanciful impulses, each more poetic than the last. Yet as Tarkovsky himself once averred, art exists only because the world is imperfect. Music thrives on insanity.

That said, the even keel of Nostalghia presents the listener with such an expressive compass that even the most elemental sound becomes a northward tug. Anyone who has followed Couturier’s ECM travels will know that he is a musician of many directions. From the taut classical forays of Poros to the border-crossing trio recordings with Anouar Brahem (see Le pas du chat noir and Le voyage de sahar), he is anything but predictable. Counting cellist Anja Lechner, accordionist Jean-Louis Matinier, and saxophonist Jean-Marc Larché among the present company, he darkens Tarkovsky’s blueprints with the press of every key until they are ashen with wayfaring.

The album’s outer circle is inscribed by way of “Erbarme Dich” from Bach’s St Matthew Passion, which seeds the opening and closing tracks by way of profound lament. In the absence of words, “Le Sacrifice” (Bach’s aria appears in the Tarkovsky film of the same name) holds on to the text of the moment. In the absence of the cross, one feels the intersection of piano and accordion as a sacrifice in and of itself. The feeling of decay is palpable—surely, if imperceptibly, approaching disappearance—as was Tarkovsky’s play of color and shadow. The concluding “L’éternel retour” unravels by way of piano alone. Like a lost entry from Vassilis Tsabropoulos’s The Promise, its hand closes the lid of a box that houses creative spirit. That the song bears dedication to Erland Josephson indicates Couturier’s attention to detail in paying tribute not only to the artist of interest, but also his brilliant actors and collaborators.

“Crépusculaire,” for instance, honors Sven Nykvist, Ingmar Bergman’s right-hand cinematographer (who also filmed The Sacrifice) and moves accordingly by the touch of Lechner’s picturesque bowing. Her feel for notecraft and harmony is matched only by her attention to atmosphere. Couturier blends pigments with charcoal-stained fingers, each a pontiff reduced to a smudge across gray sky as the accordion finds its peace in the waters below. The combination aches with dew, trembling on grass stems when the three instruments at last share the same breath in focus.

“Nostalghia” is for screenwriter Tonino Guerra, with whom Tarkovsky co-wrote the screenplay for that very film. It opens us to the affectations of the full quartet and takes its inspiration from Schnittke’s Sonata No. 1 for violoncello and piano. This gentle music is a wish turned into stone and laid in stagnant water. The most obvious dedication, “Andreï,” also incorporates the Schnittke. A steady pulse in the left hand frees the right to orbit the keyboard, while the accordion fits like wind to wing over barren plains of consciousness.

“Stalker” gives proper attention to Eduard Artemyev, who wrote the soundtracks for that film and Solaris, and meshes bucolic and hypermodern impulses in kind. Its impactful pianism gives up many relics, each more sacred than the last. Anatoly Solonitsyn, lead actor of Andrei Rublev, is the final dedicatee. With its allusions to the “Amen” from Pergolesi’s Stabat Mater, “Toliu” multiplies shades of night.

Although Couturier consciously avoided the evocation of specific Tarkovsky scenery (this is more than a concept album), the feeling of pathos is so visual that one might as well be watching a film by the great director. The pianism shines like the water so prevalent in Tarkovsky’s cinema, if not swimming among many artifacts strewn below the surface. And in any sense, Couturier is very much the director of all that one hears throughout the program, as borne out most directly in the freely improvised “Solaris I” and “Solaris II.” In these the soprano saxophone turns the sun into a pilot light, and the world its oven, even as the rest of the ensemble hangs icicles from the eaves. Still, the overall effect is more literary than filmic, picking up words and turning them into actions that grow with listening.

“Ivan” references Ivan’s Childhood, Tarkovsky’s first feature. Its declamatory beginning spawns an almost theatrical feeling in distorted fairytale gestures before the quartet rejoins to finish off strong. In the wake of such confluence, Couturier’s solo “Miroir” wipes the slate clean, leaving superbly engineered ambience as the only evidence of an inner world to be discovered. Each step taken on this Escherian staircase walks a path of light.

Perfection may be an impossible ideal, but this album almost touches it. It’s a sheet of paper curling into its own insecurity for want of inscription. Don’t let it slip through your fingers, no matter what kind of quill you wield.