Petter Fenner

The music of Norwegian trumpeter/Nu Jazz progenitor, Nils Petter Molvaer, has always been cinematic. Call it music for a non-existent movie or a film of the mind, Molvaer's albums, beginning with the groundbreaking Khmer (ECM, 1997), have always been about aural landscapes evocative of highly personal imagery and plenty of club-ready grooves. Even in performance, the lighting provided by Tord "Prince of Darkness" Knudsen is intended to provoke the imagination rather than focus attention on the musicians. It's no surprise, then, that Molvaer has been recruited to provide music for film. His score for the 2005 French film Edy already saw limited release on Molvaer's Sula imprint the same year. Re-Vision culls four pieces from Edy and, by combining them with music from two other films—the 2007 German film Hoppet and 1999 Norwegian documentary Frozen Heart—and one non-soundtrack piece, fashions a continuous 46-minute suite that stands independently as yet another highly visual piece, incorporating Molvaer's ever-expanding frames of reference. Re-Vision is also Molvaer's first release in years to not primarily feature members of his touring band, but guitarist Eivind Aarset remains a fundamental part of its overall soundscape.

Kit Downes joins forces with long-time collaborators Petter Eldh on bass and James Maddren on drums for a carefully assorted piano trio programme that treads gentle lyricism and bold creative outbursts in equal measures. Downes, whose prior ECM offering Dreamlife of Debris was termed a “work of otherworldly beauty” by BBC Music Magazine, carves out some of his most compendious pieces to date on Vermillion. Replete with subtle twists and turns, the trio offers its idiosyncratic take on the piano trio format, producing unexpected harmonic alterations and animate rhythmic flashes as they flesh out distinct musical forms. Recorded at the Auditorio Stelio Molo in Lugano, the three-piece outlines a unique design for this instrumentation in clear-cut interplay and creates a profound study of Kit Downes’ broad musical imagination in the process.

Twelve symphonies by Kraus have been preserved. Many more are mentioned in letters and notes by Kraus and others, but it is difficult to ascertain which of these have disappeared completely or which have perhaps been assimilated into works we know in some other form. Almost invariably his symphonies consist of three movements, without the traditional minuet. It is possible that Kraus found that its dance character did not suit the dignified style of his writing.

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…

The French/Martinique percussionist Mino Cinelu and the Norwegian trumpet-player Nils Petter Molvaer got together for an outstanding piece of music.They were reflecting their roots: Sula is the island from which Molvær stems, Madiana is a synonym for Martinique, where Cinelu’s father comes from. “SulaMadiana” combines all which is perceived as trusted, familiar, and achieved, with a notion of sounds beyond the horizon: glittering, shimmering, and always promising.