Karin Kallmark

Not overwhelmed with the song now playing on this album? Be patient, the next track may be something more to your liking. This album is a musical smogarsboard of songs cutting across a variety of vocal genre. The play list runs from the traditional "Sometimes I Feel like a Motherless Child," through Hoagy Carmichael's ultimate standard "Stardust" through John Coltrane's poem-song "A Love Supreme" with a little of 1960s popsters Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller thrown in. It would be unkind to say that the singer is simply trying out everything until she finds something she does well. Not so with Karen Krog, one of the finer and more inventive jazz singers of the last three decades. One on One is a compilation of three different recording sessions Krog made as part of a duo performances…

Although Karin Krog was born in Oslo and grew up in a country where Norwegian is the primary language, she is a shining example of how effectively a Scandinavian vocalist can sing English-language jazz. Raindrops, Raindrops, a best-of CD that spans 1966-1985, paints a consistently attractive picture of Krog's artistry. Assembled by a German label called Crippled Dick Hot Wax, this collection shows Krog to be an adventurous, risk-taking improviser who brings an intriguing variety of influences to the table - Sheila Jordan, Betty Carter, and Jeanne Lee have affected her work, but so have less abstract vocalists like Billie Holiday and Dinah Washington. Krog favors an inside/outside approach (usually more inside than outside), and the Norwegian improviser is as convincing on Herbie Hancock's "Maiden Voyage" as she is on Michel Legrand's "I'll Wait for You" and Thelonious Monk's "'Round Midnight"…

Originally released in 2003 Where You At? puts Scandinavian jazz chanteuse Karin Krog in front of an aggressive modern jazz trio led by drummer Steve Kuhn. The resulting tension brings both players and singer out of their respective comfort zones, making this collection of originals and standards a most enjoyable, vibrantly listenable set.

Heinrich Baermann is quite well known today as Carl Maria von Weber’s source of inspiration. The famous virtuoso, for whom Weber personally created his clarinet concertos, repeatedly took up the pen on his own – and did so with great success. Several dozen works by Baermann have been transmitted to MDG and on this recording Rita Karin Meier and the Belenus Quartet turn to his three quintets for clarinet and strings and with them bring back to life his much acclaimed cantabile playing as well as his legendary virtuosic capabilities.

By the time Karin Korg made "Gershwin with Karin Krog", from late 1973 to mid-1974, she had been making records for ten years. Indeed, her very first session, from November 1963 included two of the musicians to be heard here; pianist Egil Kapstad and drummer Jon Christensen. We also hear tenor saxophonist Bjarne Nerem and ECM bass legend Arild Andersen. This album marks the earliest occasion on which Karin set out to make a complete album devoted to a single composer.

Mozart did, it's true, "authorize" the performance of some of his piano concertos by piano and string quartet, as the notes to this Analekta release point out. But, as a Vienna freelancer in uncharted territory, he could hardly have done otherwise, and to suggest, from the perspective of 21st century Canada and its social safety net, that this indicates anything about the desirability of such a performance is questionable. Truth to tell, these two concertos from 1782, although their wind parts are not as prominent as those in some of the later ones, still sound a bit bare in their contrasts between solo and tutti here.

Karin Krog is one of Europe's leading jazz singers with a career stretching back to the 1950s. She is a unique song artist with a great international reputation possessing her own recognizable style and voice. Her constant creative approach towards contemporary jazz has never been bound by tradition, even though her music bears a deep respect for its forms. Karin is equally at home with jazz standards, blues or electronic experimental techniques. Originally released by Sonet Records this reissue of a 1966 session features an all-star line-up. A young Jan Garbarek is featured on two tracks and the stellar rhytm section is made up of Kenny Drew on piano, Niels Henning-Orsted Pedersen on bass and Jon Christensen on drums.