Mats Eilertsen

Star bassist and HUBRO veteran Mats Eilertsen presents his innovative cut and paste solo project featuring cameos from a supergroup of guests including Arve Henriksen, Eivind Aarset, Geir Sundstøl, Thomas Strønen and Per Oddvar Johansen.

Jacob Young’s fourth leader-recording for ECM not only presents the guitarist’s first pass a the guitar trio format, but moreover offers a broader view of his compositional pallet, as he, bassist Mats Eilertsen and drummer Audun Kleive explore a wide variety of pulsations, temperaments and styles, all tied together by Jacob’s always melodic embrace. On his last effort, 2015’s Forever Young, the guitarist was joined by Trygve Seim and the Marcin Wasilewski Trio, performing what The Guardian called, “a set full of undemonstrative surprises and contrasts”, where “the quality of the composing matches the formidable powers of the band.”

There have been countless attempts to counteract the inherently boring nature of the CD as an artefact and the approach adopted by Feral shapes up better than some on the strength of this first release, which takes some excellent music by saxophonist Iain Ballamy (in the company of three young Norwegian musicians) and packages it with a set of intriguing print artworks by Dave McKean in an elegant library case. On the other hand, we may now be so accustomed to the blandness of the format that any attempt to escape it seems like a distraction. While debating this, it's important not to forget to play the disc, which is quite remarkable and a far cry from Ballamy's formative years in the sprawling bloke-jazz outfit Loose Tubes. Recorded live at the Molde Jazz Festival in 1998, it's astounding that this music seems to date from the very beginning of Ballamy's association with these musicians, given their obvious level of empathy.

This record is a result of a collaboration that toured in Norway in 2012. Recorded in Rainbow Studio in Oslo. The constellation performed music in the mix of traditional folk, jazz and contemporary music. The first record with this band, The Nature of Connections, was released on Rune Grammofon in 2014 and presented only the acoustic orchestration. The music on this release contains sounds and ornaments from traditional Norwegian folk music, contemporary music, improvisation and field recorded sounds. This time the focus has been the combination of electronic sounds and the acoustic palette and how to merge this into a unique orchestration.