Twelve Hats For Lena

Anders Jormin’s new Swedish-Japanese project returns the highly distinctive voice and fiddle of Lena Willemark to ECM (her first appearance on the label in more than a decade), and introduces koto player Karin Nakagawa. In their collaborative music the Japanese classical tradition and the stark, archaic sounds of the koto, allied to Jormin’s muscular bass improvisations, form a unique context for Lena’s sung poems, delivered in her native Älvdals-dialect. Traditions and non-idiomatic improvising are cross-referenced, and new paths are opened up.

Albrecht Mendelssohn-Bartholdy was the grandson of Felix Mendelssohn. He was also a polymathic intellectual – a prestigious jurist, political scientist, and one of Germany’s observers to the Treaty of Versailles negotiations in 1919.