Vacances on a Échangé Nos Maisons

“House On A Hill” is veteran Norwegian jazz bassist and composer Terje Gewelt’s twelfth album. It features the same line-up as his critically acclaimed 2017 release “Wow And Flutter”, with Bjørn Klakegg on guitar, Erlend Slettevoll on piano and keyboards and Terje Evensen on drums and electronics. Gewelt, now sixty, has been performing and recording for over forty years with artists ranging from Billy Cobham and John Surman to Jon Christensen and Blossom Dearie.
Gewelt has his own personal approach to jazz, developed over a lifetime of listening and playing, and on this new album he continues to follow his muse. After many years of touring—including a memorable gig in Buzios, which inspired the opening cut—this past year has been spent mostly at home, as it has for many here on Earth, hence the title track “House On A Hill”.

Dimitri Mitropoulos (1896-1960) was a Greek conductor who came to America in the 1930s and made many recordings with the Minneapolis Symphony Orchestra and the New York Philharmonic Orchestra. Like Wilhelm Furtwangler of Arturo Toscanini, Mitropoulos' height of popularity came just before the advent of modern sound technology, so that many of Mitropoulos' finest recordings are marred by distortion and background noises that may make those recordings practically un-listenable to some classical music enthusiasts (although the new Sony Mitropoulos set has advertised that most of those very rough recordings have been "remastered").