It’s strange: the Norwegians Trygve Seim and Frode Haltli undoubtedly count among my favourite musicians, and both – the former a saxophonist, the latter an accordionist – have been mentioned fairly frequently on this website. (Indeed, Haltli featured in my very first blog.) Nonetheless, while preparing a few notes for the following piece about Our Time, their fifth album together, I recalled to my surprise that I’d never actually written at length here about any of their collaborations. To my surprise, because I really adore the four earlier albums – The Source and Different Cikadas (2002), Sangam (2004), Yeraz (2008) and Rumi Songs (2016) – and even reviewed the last for a magazine. Oh well, better late than never…
Most of the aforementioned albums were released under Seim’s name, since he was usually the leader and main composer. Yeraz, however, was an album of duets between Seim and Haltli, and was credited to both; though only the first and final tracks listed the pair as composers – the others being based on tunes by Seim, Gurdjeff, Bob Marley and others – so wonderfully empathetic (or should one say symbiotic?) was the duo’s interplay that one could only regard the album as a marvellous encounter of creative equals. This track, Waits for Waltz, is a fine example.
So I was very pleased to learn a few months ago that, 16 years on, another duo album was finally forthcoming. In the interim Seim and Haltli have been performing live together on a regular basis, and it certainly shows: if anything, the intensely responsive interplay between them is even more extraordinary this time around. Seim, again on soprano and tenor saxes, has one of the most distinctive and immediately recognisable sounds in jazz today – full, smooth, crystalline, now breathily sensuous, now powerfully keening – while Haltli, a true virtuoso equally at home in contemporary classical and experimental music as he is with jazz, folk and more popular forms, seems to be able to produce whatever sound (or sounds… his playing is nothing if not multi-levelled) he wants out of the accordion. The instrument is famously versatile, but Haltli constantly manages to surprise and delight; Seim too makes the most of whichever sax he is playing, so that Our Time, like Yeraz, is considerably richer – in terms of tone, timbre, texture, dynamics and colour – than many might expect from an album of duets for sax and accordion.
It’s remarkably rich in other ways, too. For one thing, it embraces a wide range of styles and influences. The opening track – Du, mi tid (in English, You, my time) is a lovely, stately Haltli composition which already appeared on his album Avant Folk – Triptyk. Fanfare is a simple Seim melody which allows for sufficiently ample embellishment to turn up twice in pleasingly different versions. The title of Arabian Tango hints at its intriguing mixed origins (let’s not forget that the Finns claim that dance form, often deemed Argentinian, as their own). There is a Ukrainian lullaby, a North Indian folk song, and a brief piece by Stravinsky. What’s more, four of these pieces are preceded by others explicitly labelled as improvisations which, as it were, provide food for thought when the compositions begin. Then again, such is the musical invention at work during the exploration of the composed pieces that it’s actually quite hard, sometimes, to tell where the improvisation starts and stops. Likewise, Haltli and Seim display such mutual musical empathy that their very different instruments occasionally appear even to merge and become one.
This may, in description, sound all a little chaotically diverse, or even culturally appropriative. Rest assured, however, that this is no insipid variation of ‘world music’. Both Seim and Haltli, besides being technically expert and highly imaginative performers and composers, are instinctively curious and admirably open-minded about music; they are aware and respectful of the origins of the material that inspires them, but rightly sceptical of boundaries, whether national or generic. In the end, the music on Our Time is exactly that; whatever its provenance, it becomes their time together, their music, in that their distinctive interplay makes it very clearly something only they could have created.
So Du, mi tid begins familiarly with Haltli’s mournful drone and Seim’s slow, swooping and soaring glissandi before proceeding to one of the accordionist’s characteristically delicate solos, then to a meditative exploration of the melody in which it’s impossible to say one instrument is leading, the other supporting. On the longest track, Improvisation No. 2/Shyama Sundara Madana Mohana, the accordion’s playful skittering is initially countered and eventually brought to heel by the soprano’s hesitant lament; the instruments then effectively exchange roles before uniting for the segue into the Indian folk melody, which is then approached from a spiralling variety of angles, deconstructed almost to the point of abstraction, and finally brought gloriously back together.
The album boasts ceaseless invention like this throughout, fresh, lyrical, subtly expressive, until it reaches the eighth and last track, Seim’s Elegi. It’s a prayer-like tune, its gentle tide-like swells creating a mood of becalmed, contemplative yet quietly powerful spirituality; at the very close, as Seim’s plangent saxophone fades, followed into silence by Haltli’s soft, scintillating notes towards the top end of the accordion’s register, it’s almost as if we are heading into an infinite unknown.
Such beauty will surely make this one of my albums of the year.
Our Time is released by ECM. Photos of Trygve Seim and Frode Haltli by Hubert Klotzeck, courtesy of Klotzeck and ECM.
notes and observations by Geoff Andrew 