There has been precious little drop everything, simply stfu and listen Nordic jazz relatable this year. That's odd given what a powerhouse of a region Nordic climes inspire to have invigorated global jazz more or less re-inventing what we expect from jazz in Europe in the process beginning probably with Jan Garbarek's Afric Pepperbird in 1971 and reaching later peaks with what the Belonging band achieved and then yet another reinivention later in the 1990s found on Khmer.
The rushing of the sea-tides of the soul - Longfellow
Perhaps the latest wave just hasn't filtered through as much as usual. But the only album we can think of as standout Nordic is intimate Norwegian/Dutch collaboration Touch of Time issued back in late-January.
And now the radically different Fourth Wave And The Moon - it's not long but you will have to wait to late-August for the full album which is to be featured hard on the heels of release when a live event launched at the remarkable Punkt festival takes place in Kristiansand not long after.
There is a link to the magical Touch of Time given one aspect in common factor is that Arve Henriksen plays a big role.
Gently washing over the words of 19th century American poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's The Sound of the Sea for which the brief opener of guitarist Bjørn Charles Dreyer's immaculate album is named ''the rushing of the sea-tides of the soul'' are indeed so evocatively captured on an album recorded mainly in southern Norway and which if you listen to nothing else includes a real beauty of a piece featuring trumpeter Henriksen called 'The Lighthouse Keeper.'
The fourth movement of the eighth Shostakovich String Quartet - known on the Dreyer album under the very Beckettian sobriquet of 'Endgame' - and interpreted down the years by the Kronos Quartet on their 1990 classic Black Angels is transformed - this lean, liminal, version is even more largo and ambient. Shostakovich wrote the elegy after visiting the still ruined Dresden years after the second world war had ended.
Bjørn free
There's sterling work from cellist Ariel de Wolf and percussionist Henning Seldal on this Erik Honoré produced recording particularly in the arrangement of the fourth movement of the eighth Shostakovich String Quartet. Elsewhere the title track has a stunning dramatic opening which needs to be heard in the best audio kit you have at home at your disposal. Certainly it is audiophile friendly. Henriksen's soloing on 'Armada' is also stunning. There's a range of different styles on the work whether pitchbend Americana on the lapping title track to more ambient Nordic sounds and there's a tendency to be both New Agey (not at all absurdly flakey by the way) and latently jazz relevant all at once.
Three years on from the even more floaty and minimal orchestra project the elegiac Time and Mass - created in a therapeutic vein dealing with personal loss and grief - this latest is inspired by the southern Norwegian coast and recorded there in a church. US born Norway raised player Dreyer shapes his music around De Wolf and Seldal with guests besides Henriksen including drummer percussionist Erland Dahlen and the Kristiansand Symphony Orchestra. There's a massive sense of wisdom, balm and sonic solution somehow to the challenges this messed up world confronts all of us with on a daily basis provided by Fourth Wave And The Moon. And in that vein you'll get a lot out of all this when it drops - long as you know you're living yours.
Bjørn Charles Dreyer, photo: Lisbeth Finsådal
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