Ketil Björnstad

To celebrate the 60th birthday (on 25 April) of Norwegian jazz pianist/composer/novelist and poet Ketil Bjornstad, ECM issues a double album as "literary soundtrack", its release also coinciding with the Norwegian publication of the one-volume edition of Bjornstad's highly-acclaimed fictional 'Vinding' trilogy, 'To Music', 'The River' and 'The Lady in the Valley'. After keeping his musical and writing activities entirely separate for decades, Renaissance Man Bjornstad dissolved the boundaries with his 'Vinding' books: "When I had the idea of writing a trilogy about the young piano student Aksel Vinding, I realised that I would have to grant music access to my world of writing. This felt surprisingly liberating, almost like a confession.

Ketil Bjørnstad's passion for the English metaphysical poet John Donne (1572-1631) is a lifelong affair. The Norwegian pianist-composer's settings of Donne's verse have led to recordings including The Shadow, Grace, the ECM album The Light, and now this important disc. "After working with the texts of John Donne for more than twenty years, I still find new approaches to understanding what he wrote and I find music throughout. It is in the language, in the rhythm, in the silence between the sentences - a passionate quest for meaning and reconciliation. Donne's dramatic life is reflected in the texts and everywhere in them you will find the passion, melodies and sounds".

Commissioned by the Molde International Jazz Festival and recorded live at the Norwegian festival in 2010, “La notte” is a salute to Italian filmmaker Michelangelo Antonioni, whom Ketil Bjørnstad counts amongst his formative influences. “At the same time that I discovered what jazz could be, after listening to Miles Davis’ In A Silent Way, I also saw the films by Godard, Bresson and Antonioni. Perhaps it was the slow, rhythmic authority in the films by Michelangelo Antonioni that made me think of music… As long as visual art creates music in our minds, and music creates pictures and visual expressions with the same intensity, the two are deeply and profoundly interdependent”. This album, then, can be considered “the soundtrack to an inner film”, in which Antonioni’s images and atmospheres are translated and transformed through personal moods and memories.

The Nest (released 2003 in Oslo, Norway on the Emarcy (067 153-2) label) is an album by Norwegian pianist Ketil Bjørnstad, with special guest artist Anneli Drecker, presenting lyrics by the poet Hart Crane (1899-1932).

Described by producer Shu-Fang Wang as "an imaginary soundtrack originally composed for a film story set in Taipei," Before the Light gives the music of ECM recording artist Ketil Bjørnstad a cinematic twist. For this album, the pianist has written a handful of romantic melodies and atmospheric moods. The former are presented in different arrangements scattered throughout the album; the latter often include guitar soundscapes and programmed rhythm tracks. Bjørnstad is accompanied by guitarist Eivind Aarset, viola player Nora Taksdal, and keyboardist Kjetil Bjerkestrand. Each one of these short pieces (none over six minutes) makes a melodic statement that could be qualified as being quintessential ECM. .

The inside booklet for Norwegian pianist and composer Ketil Bjørnstad's Seafarer's Song begins with a small statement by the Spanish author Juan Jose Millas about the plight of the truly shipwrecked, the ruined in our postmodern times, where messages of distress don't come in bottles, but inside the real human bodies of refugees. It speaks volumes about the music included here. Bjørnstad has given us yet another album of the water to be sure, something he has done since the inception of his solo career for ECM, but he has done so in a completely different way. There is no jazz on the Seafarer's Song, and yes; that's a plus. Utilizing his long-standing band which includes trumpeter Nils Petter Molvaer, guitarist Eivind Aarset, drummer Per Lindvall, bassist Bjorn Kjellemyr, and cellist Svante Henryson, Bjørnstad ups the ante by employing the brilliant if unconventional vocalist Kristin Asbjornsen…

Ketil Bjørnstad previously explored the life of Edvard Munch in his acclaimed 1993 novel Historien om Edvard Munch. When invited to compose music for choir in 2011 his thoughts turned once again to Munch and to the writings, still not widely known, of the proto-Expressionist Norwegian painter. With these as his guide, Bjørnstad shaped Soloppgang (“Sunrise”) subtitled “A cantata on texts by Edvard Munch”. In his liner notes, Bjørnstad observes that “the texts written by Munch can be compared to his paintings in their power and intensity.
He wanted to be a writer as well as a painter… texts from different periods in Munch’s life have been used in Sunrise. They all portray existentialist dilemmas: surviving or being destroyed, believing or observing”…