Cæcilie Norby - Sisters in Jazz (ACT MUSIC 2019)

Look at the history of jazz, and it is all…frankly...a bit male. There have, of course, always been very prominent female jazz singers, but female instrumentalists and composers such as Jutta Hipp, Carla Bley or Geri Allen are few and far between. Today, even though men are still in the majority, female emancipation in jazz has definitely happened. Women are increasingly raising their profile and their visibility, and really making their presence felt. And the album "Sisters in Jazz" is proof positive of just how good a thing that is.

Jazz is feminine too. In fact, this short sentence serves as a very apt description of Cæcilie Norby's new album. The Danish singer has never been afraid to explore new avenues artistically. Her unique and versatile singing style has enabled her to collaborate with top instrumentalist on the International Jazz Scene. Most of whom have been male! So when producer Siggi Loch presented her with the idea of an all female band, celebrating women in Jazz, she was delighted. She says: "There is no doubt that strong, compentent female musicians are underrepresented on the music scene- nor is there any doubt that they excist!!“

With Rita Marcotulli (piano), Nicole Johänntgen (saxophone), Hildegunn Øiseth (trumpet), Lisa Wulff (double bass) and Dorota Piotrowska (drums), Loch has placed a band of outstanding European instrumentalists alongside the singer. After a Jazz at Berlin Philharmonic concert which he curated in November 2017 under the title "Sisters in Jazz" (with Terri Lyne Carrington as leader), he has taken the idea of the female band further, and provided Norby with strong female musicians for a studio album.

All the compositions were written by women, by jazz pioneers such as Betty Carter ("Droppin' Things"), Abbey Lincoln ("Love Has Gone Away") and Nina Simone (“Do I Move You?”) or the queen of the thoughtful singer-songwriters herself, Joni Mitchell ("Big Yellow Taxi" and "Man From Mars"). Plus two songs by Norby, and one by Rita Marcotulli.

"This album celebrates women in jazz,” says Norby. “That's why it was important to me that there were women artists who had a strong influence on my life and artistic development. Abbey Lincoln's and Nina Simone's songs don’t just have great melodies, but also great lyrics. I wanted to have lyrics that would fit with my age and life experience. “Bonnie Raitt's song "All At Once", for example, is a kind of love song, but it's also about broken hearts and families that are falling apart. These are grown-up, mature lyrics full of experience, not the usual jazz love songs."

The countries of origin of the musicians are very diverse, as are their artistic influences. "Sisters in Jazz" demonstrates the power of improvised music and its ability to bring people and even nationalities together. The music on the album encaptures the scintillating piano solos by Italian Rita Marcotulli, trumpet lines with a very unique sound by Norwegian Hildegunn Øiseth, the saxophone sound of the Swiss player Nicole Johänntgen which is very deeply rooted in tradition - here together with a powerful, grooving rhythm section with Lisa Wulff, from Northern Germany and Dorota Piotrowska, who originally hails from Poland. The percussionist Marilyn Mazur joins as a guest on four pieces. Whether they’re playing easy swing, or cool, or elegiac-nordic, or hard-hitting, or getting drenched in the blues, the musical range of “Sisters in Jazz is impressively wide.

The age range between the youngest musician in the line-up and the oldest is 30 years. "Sisters in Jazz" thus refers to another factor that is of only peripheral importance in jazz: the age of the players. "That's the great thing about jazz, borders like nationality, gender and age just disappear as soon as you start to make music."

Jazz is music of strong personalities who communicate with each other, jazz is timeless and ageless, knows no national borders and should also completely overcome gender boundaries. Because when the recording light goes on in the studio, all discussions of gender are over: "As soon as you play, it's all about listening and interacting. Then, it’s only the musical personality that counts", says Norby. There is only one conclusion: jazz is not male, jazz is not female, but it is above all one thing: human.

Cæcilie Norby / vocals & percussion

Rita Marcotulli / piano

Nicole Johänntgen / saxophone

Hildegunn Øiseth / trumpet

Lisa Wulff / bass

Dorota Piotrowska / drums

Marilyn Mazur / percussion (04, 06, 07 & 09)

1 Easy Money ( Rickie Lee Jones) 04:20

2 Willow Weep For Me ( Ann Ronell ) 04:49

3 Droppin‘ Things ( Betty Carter) 04:34

4 Man From Mars ( Joni Mitchell) 06:24

5 Naked In The Dark ( Cæcilie Norby) 03:59

6 First Conversation ( Cæcilie Norby) 04:58

7 Puzzled ( Rita Marcotulli / Cæcilie Norby) 03:47

8 Love Has Gone Away ( Abbey Lincoln) 04:25

9 Big Yellow Taxi ( Joni Mitchell) 04:04

10 All At Once ( Bonnie Raitt) 05:54

11 Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow ( Carole King & Gerry Goffin) 04:52

12 Do I Move You ( Nina Simone) 03:43

Produced by Siggi Loch with the artist

Recorded and mixed by Thomas Vang at Village Studios, Copenhagen, Denmark

Additional recordings by Lars Danielsson at Tia Dia Studios, Mölnlycke, Sweden

Mastered by Klaus Scheuermann

Frode Haltli - Avant Folk (HUBRO MUSIC April 2018)

The opening track of ‘Avant Folk’ is like a dream of what contemporary experimental folk-meets-jazz-meets-chamber-music might be. Composed by Frode Haltli, ‘Hug’ begins with a galumphing off-centre rhythm that could be an accompaniment to elephants waltzing before the wheezing bellows-breath of Haltli’s accordion creates delightfully airy whispers of noise that drift across the other instruments like wisps of cloud across the sky.

Then we get the entry of the theme, a compulsive Nordic ear-worm folk melody led by Hardanger fiddle and violin that’s half woozy sea-shanty and half universal pan-African groove, backed up by shuffle-beat drumming like Ed Blackwell with Ornette Coleman. As if that wasn’t enough for one tune already, the music continues to evolve, with a beautifully poised improvised solo on trumpet by Hildegunn Øiseth that sounds so perfect it should really win some kind of award on its own. The groove slows down, the elephant waltz returns to form a satisfyingly symmetrical conclusion and the music gradually resolves into silence, bringing to an end what has been seven and a half minutes of continuous invention. It’s quite a performance, and quite a band, the dectet of expert players covering enough instruments between them to simulate the tonal breadth of a full orchestra while retaining the humble, home-made aesthetic of a traditional folk ensemble, matching compositional sophistication and individual virtuosity with collective empathy and hard-won grace.

Elsewhere, as the album develops, the folk references expand to include echoes of west African desert blues, east European gypsy swing, Armenian double-reed laments and lugubrious Nordic village knees-ups on a range of material partly adapted from traditional hymn-tunes and songs from Norway and the Faroe islands to form a kind of north Atlantic gumbo. But ‘Avant Folk’ never feels like a slapdash fusion of different elements mashed together without regard for the integrity of the whole. Importantly, the band always sounds like a proper band, as fleet-footed as any improvisational jazz ensemble, and able to hurdle with ease the normal generic divides separating one type of music from another. By the time the listener reaches the end of the album’s final track, ’Neid’ – another Frode Haltli composition, like the opening ‘Hug’ – ‘Avant Folk’ has effectively created its own genre, a pleasingly congruent collection of stylistic traits that sounds like nothing so much as itself. All the music, whether composed by Frode Haltli or adapted from antique sources, is arranged jointly by Haltli and the band members.

So where did ‘Avant Folk’ come from and why does it sound so good? For a start, Frode Haltli (born 1975, Norway) is, like many of the ensemble’s star players, a classically-trained virtuoso who from an early age (he began the accordion at seven) has been well used to working between different forms of music, from traditional folk to the avant-garde, and to collaborating with players from all sorts of backgrounds. Haltli also composes, both on his own and with Maja S.K.Ratkje (his co-producer on ‘Avant Folk’, who is responsible for the album’s editing and mixing), and has developed very strong links with fellow musicians and composers both within Norway and internationally, once again working across the normal boundaries demarcating one musical form from another, recording the complete accordion works of Arne Nordheim, for example, but also appearing with the various groups of jazz saxophonist Trygve Seim. His debut recording for ECM, ‘Looking On Darkness’ was released in 2002, followed by ‘Passing Images’ from 2007, (with trumpeter Arve Henriksen, violist Garth Knox and Maja S.K. Ratkje on vocals), and ‘Air’ (2016), a recording of music for accordion and strings by Hans Abrahamsen and Bent Sorensen with the Arditti Quartet and the Trondheim Soloists. His debut release for Hubro, ‘Vagabonde Blu’ (2014), is a live solo recording featuring works by Salvatore Sciarrino, Aldo Clementi and Arne Nordheim. As if any further exemplars of Frode Haltli’s customary melding of the classical repertoire with folk, jazz and beyond were needed, we can also note his current duo with the Norwegian violinist Gjermund Larsen; The Snowflake Trio (with Irish flautist Nulala Kennedy and Norwegian fiddler Vegar Vardal); and a trio with another fiddler, Ragnhild Furebotten, and the Swedish nyckelharpist Emilia Amper.

The breadth of Frode Haltli’s interests is not unusual in Norwegian music and this is paralleled by a number of his collaborators on ‘Avant Folk’, many of whom – like the inspirational fiddler Erlend Apneseth (a regular Hubro artist in a number of settings) or the keyboardist Stale Storlokken (of Supersilent and Motorpsycho, among others) enjoy similarly wide-ranging careers that weave in and out of numerous musical styles and settings. But the last word on ‘Avant Folk’ has to be the music. The album ends on the suitably epic note of Haltli’s ‘Neid’, an original composition that sounds absolutely timeless, matching a maelstrom of squeaky-gate post-serialist glissandi with an ancient-sounding dirge-like refrain. Haltli’s own stunningly adept accordion solo, its intensely emotional voicings heard against a splashy biscuit tin-lid style percussive backdrop, then gives way to the stately pairing of gently-stepping double-bass and country-roots electric guitar that in turn heads eastwards towards the Balkans before ending up back home in the northlands again, the thirteen minute performance superbly resolving itself in a final sequence of transcendent hymn-like solemnity. Wow.

Frode Haltli – accordion

Erlend Apneseth – Hardanger fiddles

Hans P. Kjorstad – violin

Rolf-Erik Nystrøm – saxophones

Hildegunn Øiseth – trumpet, goat horn and vocals

Ståle Storløkken – harmonium and synthesizers

Juhani Silvola – guitars and electronics

Oddrun Lilja Jonsdottir – guitar and vocals

Fredrik Luhr Dietrichson – double bass

Siv Øyunn Kjenstad – drums and vocals

A

Kingo

Trio

Hug

B

Gråtar'n

Neid