Trygve

“Pure beauty is the common tone of Trygve Seim and Frode Haltli. There is something folk-song-like in this music – intersections where secular and sacred music meet to dance”. This is what the German weekly paper Die Zeit said on the duo’s debut release Yeraz back in 2008 and while the statement still holds up today, the rapport between the saxophonist and the accordionist has grown even more fluid in the meantime. On Our Time Trygve and Frode exchange counterpuntal glances, lyrical swells and textural explorations with grace, eloquence and utmost nuance, presenting a programme of originals, improvisations and evocative recastings of traditional folk songs from Ukraine and North-India. Recorded at the Himmelfahrtskirche in Munich, in 2023, and produced by Manfred Eicher, on Our Time the saxophonist and accordionist’s tones meet in a surreal and magical dance.

Trygve Seim is one of ECM's rising stars, very much the inheritor of Jan Garbarek's mantle, although his beautiful ballad-playing and fat tone have drawn comparisons to a European Ben Webster. Subtitled 'Songs for Saxophone and Piano', this simple, powerfully melodic album includes a repertoire of new musical settings of parts of the Mass, folk songs, theatre music, improvisations, and a new version of Seim's softlybreathing meditation 'Bhavana'. (Source: amazon.com)

The second ECM album by Norwegian cooperative group The Source gets back to basics. Since its formation in 1993, when founder-members Trygve Seim, Øyvind Brække and Per Oddvar Johansen were all students at the Trøndelag Conservatory of Music in Trondheim, The Source has been very much a moveable feast, its motto, "No two concerts alike!" The group has embraced the wildest stylistic collisions, working variously with poets and DJs, rai vocalists and rappers, ice hockey players, and conceptual and performance artists. Their collaborators have ranged from rock band Motorpsycho to classical musicians including the Cikada String Quartet (as on their 2000 ECM recording The Source and Different Cikadas). Nonetheless, the overwhelming majority of their performances have been as a quartet, most of their music was written for quartet, and this eponymously titled disc addresses a backlog of much-played material whose appearance on disc is overdue.

The Norwegian saxophonist Trygve Seim grew up in the provincial coastal city of Trondheim. It was calm and quiet, there were no crowds and he could hike in the wooded hills, with their trails and camp-sites. He really liked it there. Just released, Seim's first album as a leader - Different Rivers - sounds organized and clean, cold and uncrowded like that. … Different Rivers is melancholy, lonely, hypnotizing music - harder to escape from than to listen to. Like a fireplace in an ice palace, you get hooked on it; it's almost physical. … Seim's version of the ECM sound presents a wind-instrument chamber ensemble, a sort of slow-floating, pianissimo little-big band with occasional understated kicks. The shadow of Gil Evans hovers. The hornblowers finesse their personal, breathy, nonsymphonic textures from behind the beat.