Commissioned by the Skopje Jazz Festival and premiered at its 42nd edition in 2023, After the Wildfire was performed live in an evening marked by the dim glow of the stage, an orchestra breathing with the electronics, the wealth of sounds conjured by sampler Jan Bang, and Arve Henriksen’s trumpet cutting through the hall like a quiet flame. The premiere offered an immersion into a unique sonic world. Now released as a physical album, the recording feels both familiar and freshly transformed — like the same landscape viewed at a different hour.
The album is built around an eight-movement suite, a careful weaving of live performance and studio work, though it is hard to tell where one ends and the other begins.
Tag Archive: Arve Henriksen
The Scandinavian project Arcanum brings together four artists all well-known to followers of music at ECM: Arve Henriksen, Trygve Seim, Anders Jormin and Markku Ounaskari. They’ve played together in many permutations over the years, but this is their first album as a quartet. Already hailed as a “Nordic supergroup” in some quarters, the designation hardly conveys the thoughtful, reflective quality of the improvising and the sensitivity of the interaction here, whether playing music composed in real time or taking a written theme to new places.
Ounaksari, Jormin and Seim were all working with folksinger and kantele player Sinikka Langeland when the idea of a new band was first raised: “We’d often play as a trio during soundchecks…