Jan Bang

David Sylvian's Manafon (2009) appeared as a collection of disciplined art songs that relied on his collaborators to inform not only their textures, but their forms. Those players - Jan Bang, Evan Parker, John Tilbury, Dai Fujikura, Erik Honoré, Otoma Yoshide, and Christian Fennesz among them - created airy, often gently dissonant structures for Sylvian's lyrics and melodic ideas. Died in the Wool (Manafon Variations) re-employs these players (with some new ones) in the considerable reworking of five of Manafon's compositions. There are also six new songs that include unused outtakes, and two poems by Emily Dickinson set to music and sung by Sylvian. The new music here relies heavily on Sylvian's association with Fujikura: he composed, arranged, and conducted chamber strings that are prevalent…

Which brings us to Norwegian Grammy-winning pianist and composer Wesseltoft's latest for his own Jazzland label. Halfway between the lounge lizard irony of Dimitri from Paris and the lyrical quartet settings of Dave Brubeck or the acoustic Herbie Hancock, Sharing is one of those mould-breaking sets that tend to outlast the vagaries of musical fashion.

While the Norwegian jazz scene has been pursuing its own course for decades, the period of 1996-1997 represented a significant watershed, a milestone where an entirely new kind of music emerged, linked to jazz but distanced considerably—some might say completely, but they'd be mistaken—from its roots in the American tradition. Three seminal and groundbreaking albums were released within a year of each other: trumpeter Nils Petter Molvær's Khmer (ECM, 1997); noise improv group Supersilent's 1- 3 (Rune Grammofon, 1997); and, beating the others by a year, keyboardist Bugge Wesseltoft's aptly titled New Conception of Jazz (Jazzland, 1996). All three explored the integration of electronics, disparate cultural references, programming, turntables and—especially in the case of Supersilent, the most avant-garde of the three— noise, to create aural landscapes that were innovative, otherworldly and refreshingly new.

This SACD hybrid recording was beautifully crafted at Oslo's Rainbow Studio with engineer Jan Erik Kongshaug, home and technician behind so many classic ECM recordings. While Libera Me is unquestionably a well-crafted album for those who want to simply sit back and be enveloped by something that doesn't confront or challenge, it is in the odd man out tracks—"The Teacher," "Both Sides Now," and especially "Asnah"—where we hear what this album could have been and, perhaps, should have been. Hopefully they are harbingers of what Danielsson has in store next time around.

Nils Petter Molvaer has built over 20+ years a huge body of work that has explored the parameters of recording studio and electronica jazz ranging from dance-beat to ambient. At the centre of it all is his extraordinarily intimate and expressive trumpet, a post-Miles player who has truly staked out his own territory, taking that Miles influence to another dimension. Re-Vision is neither beaty nor ambient, but decidedly meditative. These were pieces originally written for film soundtracks but they are far more structured than many 'cinematic' offerings and stand up strongly as music alone.
NPM's main collaborators here are DJ/producer/recordist Jan Bang and guitarist Eivind Asrset, both central forces in the Norwegian electronica jazz scene…

David Sylvian's Blemish album was the first release to appear on his own newly formed independent label Samadhisound in 2003. Written as a break from a project he was working on with Steve Jansen, Blemish is a suite of eight compositions based on studio recordings of live improvisational sessions utilizing Sylvian's voice as the focal point, minimal electronic brush-strokes and, on three songs, the prominently showcased free-jazz guitar work of Derek Bailey. Samadhisound returns to this fertile ground for its fifth release with The Good Son vs The Only Daughter: The Blemish Remixes, a collection of often radical re-workings by eight artists of seven of those original, stark compositions, all personally commissioned by Sylvian himself.

Sly & Robbie meets Nils Petter Molvaer feat. Eivind Aarset and Vladislav Delay - Nordub (2018) [FLAC] {Okeh Records}
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© 2018 OKeh Records | 88985406342
Jazz / Dub / Electronic / Fusion / Trumpet

On “Nordub”, Grammy-winning Reggae legends Sly & Robbie team up with Norwegian Jazz innovator Nils Petter Molvaer to create a unique sound panorama, spanning the colorful atmospheres of Norwegian Jazz and the energetic grooves of Jamaica. Together with Eivind Aarset on guitars and Vladislav Delay on electronics, this is a band of musical soulmates, beyond all boundaries of genre. During a first tour in 2016 they received worldwide attention for their new project.

“Ha!” is the fourth Humcrush album, this time with the most welcome addition of singer Sidsel Endresen. Having toured together for a couple of years, they finally recorded some shows last year. This album was beautifully recorded in concert at Willisau Jazzfestival and is a great example of the duo´s seamless interaction as well as Endresen´s ability to improvise, listen, react, adapt and surprise, fully showing that we are dealing with one of the world´s leading vocal improvisors, coming from years of experience from solo work and collaborations with musicians like Bugge Wesseltoft, Helge Sten, Christian Wallumrød, Rolf Wallin, Jan Bang, Håkon Kornstad and Stian Westerhus.

The Norwegian trumpeter’s ninth album feels like an opaque and ambient jazz album you can walk right into. Truly, his instrument always seems on the verge of speaking.