Norwegian trumpeter Arve Henriksen has long been one of the pioneers of a new music that blends jazz, electronica, and atmospheric experimentation, as on classic albums like Cartography and Towards Language. For Arcanum, however, he largely eschews machinery to simply collaborate with some Scandinavian fellow travelers. Norwegian saxophonist Trygve Seim, Swedish bassist Anders Jormin, and Finnish drummer Markku Ounaskari – all of whom have worked with Henriksen throughout their respective careers, including with experimental folk/jazz singer Sinikka Langeland – join the brass man for a program of improvisations and composed pieces that hearkens back to the freewheeling early days of Scandinavian jazz.
Without Henriksen’s usual synthesized sheen and throbbing grooves, the group relies on their long-held chemical interplay instead. In the tradition of the late, great Jon Christensen, Ounaskari tends to dance around the beat, rather than emphasize it – letting the space between hits speak louder than his cymbals. That gives his comrades plenty of room to roam, which they do – the hornblowers shake off the atmospheric shackles of their solo work and squeal, honk, and blurt as often as they hum, sigh, and moan. Jormin acts as anchor, his melodic thrum grounding the songs to this dimension, guiding the other instruments toward periods of rest as often as it eggs them on.
Opener “Nokitpyrt,” authored by Seim, starts with a relaxed rhythm and a lazy tone, but evolves into a urgently frenetic maelstrom. The group composition “Lost in Vanløse” lets the horns wind around each other until it’s impossible to tell which bell is making which sound, while the rhythm section keeps the pulse burbling like a river about to go over the falls. Misty and calm, Jormin’s “Koto” wanders through a Nordic forest at dawn, as smooth as a snake’s skin and as restless as a hungry ghost. Another spontaneous composition, “Old Dreams” – whose title nods toward the wonderful Old and New Dreams, another trumpet/sax/bass/drums quartet that cast a skeptical eye toward anything resembling a boundary – lets the musicians ramble in their own directions, the kind of free jazz that used to define the Scandi jazz scene in the sixties and seventies. The collectively written “Fata Morgana” closes the record on a mysterious note, as the horns float in and out of the droning arrangement and reverb nearly acts as a fifth instrument.
Bolstered by chemistry that comes from literal decades of playing together, the quartet moves easily and gracefully from stealthy to savage, moody to monstrous, silver to gold. After years of coming together for the sake of other artists, the band proves itself on Arcanum ready to make a new musical mark for its own sake.
