Arve Henriksen - ‘Arcanum’

Discovering the joys of trio improvisation during pre-show sound-checks while touring with Sinikka Langeland, Trygve Seim (tenor & soprano saxophones), Anders Jormin (bass) and Markku Ounaskari (drums) have close to twenty years of shared experience to draw on. Seim’s association with Arve Henriksen (trumpet) extends back even further, the trumpeter featuring heavily on the saxophonist’s ECM debut Different Rivers (1999). Yet perhaps what is most surprising about this album is not the telepathic nature of the group’s exchanges, but the music’s very deliberate marriage of Scandinavian folk music and ‘60s free jazz. It’s an approach which deliberately harkens back to the high watermarks of ECM’s very earliest days, and it arrives like an invigorating blast of cold air.

Opening with the cryptically titled ‘Nokitpyrt’, which when read backwards spells the name of Garbarek, Andersen and Vesala’s 1972 masterpiece Triptykon, the quartet immediately stakes out its territory. If Garbarek was coming out of late period Coltrane and Ayler, this quartet leans more towards the seminal quartets of Ornette Coleman and Don Cherry. There’s an almost child-like naivety to its theme, with Henriksen and Seim then improvising on parallel paths in a scintillating passage of free jazz. The quartet’s radical re-working of the tradition Finnish hymn ‘Armon Lapset’ is even more rooted in that seminal era. Set in motion by Jormin’s languid intro, its theme slowly unfolds before Seim’s crystalline soprano soars on an eddy of pure joy.

Elsewhere, Jormin’s relaxed bass groove provides the perfect platform for Seim’s playful excursion on ‘Folkesong’, and the haunting ‘Trofast’ reminds me of Garbarek’s writing from a little later in the ‘70s, that series of transitional albums which included Places, Wayfarer and Photo With. ‘Lost In Vanløse’, ‘Old Dreams’ and ‘Pharaoh’ are three very different collective improvisations which together illustrate the quartet’s range. The first is the type of spacious free ballad for which Triptykon provided the blueprint, the second a roller-coaster inspired by Coleman and Cherry, and the third an elegiac piece punctuated by Jormin and Ounaskari’s gloriously approximate time-keeping.

Jormin’s sorrowful ‘Elegy’, written on the first day of the war in Ukraine, feels like a sister-piece to Coleman’s ‘What Reason Could I Give’, which follows. The piece appeared on Cherry’s final album Dona Nostra (1993), and despite being just over ninety seconds in length this performance perfectly encapsulates its wistful spirit. Special mention should also be made of ‘La Fontaine’, where Seim’s sinewy tenor roams free, and the closing ‘Fata Morgana’, whose dark undertow and mysterious shapes create an aural approximation of the mirage-like phenomena after which it was named.

All told, Arcanum is a triumph of focused interplay, and a brilliantly inventive foray into what remains my favourite period in ECM’s long history. More controversially perhaps, it’s also the perfect antidote to some of the label’s relatively anodyne latter-day output.

from https://ukjazznews.com