The Most Beautiful Sounds Next to Silence

Though most associated with Rune Grammofon, and with a long career spanning Supersilent’s flaming prog improv, orchestral work and Jan Bang’s electronica, Arve Henriksen’s ECM sojourns make perfect sense, fascinated as he is with spiritual spaces, not least those in Norwegian nature. This first album with Dutch pianist Harmen Fraanje conjures cavernous physical realms and atmospheres, in order to pass through emotional portals into some sort of light.

‘Melancholia’ sets a familiar Nordic mood, a sepulchral, organ-like fade-in meeting Henriksen’s high lonesome trumpet as it heads into ambient mist. Henriksen’s vocals (not on this record) can hit feminine highs, and he is intrigued by the flute’s possibilities; his high, breathily burred trumpet here often recalls the pan-pipe reveries of Morricone’s The Mission score as much as peers on his own instrument such as Nils Petter Molvær. Melancholy meanwhile spreads through this album as a sweet sadness.

Fraanje has three solo compositions alongside seven joint songs, including near nine-minute centrepiece ‘Redream’. The pianist states a pretty, slowly unfolding melody made briefly uneasy by Henriksen’s bent cry and dissonant squeal. An essentially neo-classical piece is further disrupted by electronic echoes and distant clangs, suggesting mineshaft ghosts’ eerie footsteps.

The feeling that sensitive emotional terrain is being shared by Grieg and Ibsen’s monstrous Goblin King and dank, perhaps subconscious caverns is increased by ‘Mirror Images’. Henriksen sounds cowed and shaky, a flinching animal in aqueous, miraculous terrain haunted by his own submarine mer-harmonies. Think of Jules Verne and Captain Nemo, too. In under three minutes, he’s in another world.

Another Fraanje tune, ‘What All This Is’, seems key to both men’s philosophies. The pianist is peaceable and calmly resolved, Henriksen sublimely reaching for wonder, both ending near suspended in cool waters. Fraanje’s title track reiterates a romantic world of continual dawn, a fragilely hopeful brightening to set against ‘The Dark Light’’s shadowy aura. Of course produced by Manfred Eicher, you could hear this as ECM business as usual, an idea of jazz which can be icy and insular. Touch of Time, though, meets ECM’s ethos at its best: a refined European soul.

(https://www.jazzwise.com)