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Thread: AAJ Review: Sinikka Langeland, The Half-Finished Heaven

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    AAJ Review: Sinikka Langeland, The Half-Finished Heaven



    My review of Sinikka Langeland's The Half-Finished Heaven, today at All About Jazz.

    She may have debuted on ECM (and, consequently, far beyond the borders of her native Norway) with 2007's Starflowers, but Sinikka Langeland has, in fact, been around for more than two decades, with her first album, Langt Innpå Skoga, released on Norway's Grappa label in 1994. Composer, singer and master of the kantele—an antiquated Scandinavian dulcimer/zither variant that Langeland has turned into a living, breathing instrument—it was on Starflowers and her 2011 ECM follow-up with the same ensemble, The Land That is Not, that Langeland began to more fully explore the nexus of folkloric traditionalism and contemporary improvisation, with a cherry-picked group that included fellow label mates including Norwegian saxophonist Trygve Seim and trumpeter Arve Henriksen, Swedish bassist Anders Jormin and Finish drummer/percussionist Markku Ounaskari.

    With his schedule simply too busy to continue with a group whose chemistry could be felt from the first notes of Starflowers, Henriksen was not present when Langeland presented her ensemble at the fortieth annual Vossa Jazz festival in 2013, but it was clear that the strength of Langeland's music was able to transcend even the loss of such an important group member. With The half-finished heaven, Langeland proves that point even further by minting a new quartet that brings Seim and Ounaskari back, but replaces double bass with Lars Anders Tomter's viola in a program that, for the first time, focuses much more heavily on instrumental music, with only three of its dozen compositions—all but one, a traditional polsdans from Finnskogen, composed by Langeland—featuring Langeland's evocative voice, interpreting words by the very recently deceased (March 26, 2015) Swedish poet Tomas Tranströmer.

    While it's fair to say that Langeland's distinctive voice is missed, that in no way makes The half-finished heaven any less impressive than what has come before. In fact, freed of the constraints of singing, Langeland's playing is even more impressive, blending beautifully with Tomter's viola and Seim's tenor saxophone—as ever, more attuned to tone and the perfection of every note than any kind of overt virtuosic intent, even though what he does requires absolute mastery of his instrument. Ounnaskari's combination of kit work and hand percussion acts, at times, as rhythmic driver on "The magical bird" but elsewhere as pure color on the aptly titled "Hymn to the fly," where his bells and delicate hand percussion provide a flighty texture around which Tomter's viola, Langeland's strummed kantele and Seim's low-register saxophone—the song's primary melodic focus—come together as a unified voice.

    Continue reading here...
    Last edited by jkelman; 03-31-2015 at 09:56 AM.

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