CD ECM Records Tord Gustavsen Quartet: Extended Circle

2014

Tord Gustavsen - pian
Tore Brunborg - saxofon tenor
Mats Eilertsen - contrabas
Jarle Vespestad - tobe





The sixth ECM album from Tord Gustavsen, recorded in Oslo in June 2013, quietly but most assuredly takes the Norwegian pianist’s music to the next stage of its development. Gustvasen’s quartet with Tore Brunborg, Mats Eilertsen and long-term associate Jarle Vespestad has matured into a group whose interactions draw strength from restraint, patiently building the music toward its climaxes. Here are new gospel-tinged pieces and ballads from Tord’s pen, gentle and luminescent group improvisations, and an ecstatic interpretation of the Norwegian traditional “Eg Veit I Himmerik Ei Borg” (“I Know A Castle In Heaven”).


Norwegian pianist Tord Gustavsen's quartet sounded discreetly funkier than formerly on their 2012 album, The Well, and another veil of that discretion is peeled off with Extended Circles – a delicious collage of hypnotic grooving, softly stroked gospel themes, and perhaps more gloves-off jazz piano from the leader than on all five of his previous ECM albums. The short opener, ‘Right There’, is a classic Gustavsen piano theme of gently soulful enquiries. Then saxophonist Tore Brunborg fuels an intense account of the traditional Norwegian hymn ‘Eg Veit I Himmerik Ei Borg’, built on Jarle Vespestad's snare-drum patterns and swelling to a warbling incantation. ‘The Gift’ is an episode of eerily slow jazz balladeering, ‘Staying There’ a gripping passage of snorty tenor-sax over a seamless Jarrett-like thunder, but there's also plenty of evidence – such as the static yet vibrant ‘Glow’ – that Gustavsen's persuasive fragility is still intact.
John Fordham, The Guardian

Despite seeming spacious and understated, Tord Gustavsen’s music demands and holds careful attention and transcends the traditional moody plaintiveness of the Nordic jazz tradition, not that those who enjoy all the above will find it in any way alienating. There’s a kind of lateral thinking present in much of the pianist’s work, in which ideas and styles are stated or implied in a kind of bare bones fashion. And these transform into something else altogether, often in the space of no more than a few bars. [...] that all this happens in the sparse context he favours (and tends to transmit to his sidemen, at least on this disc) is remarkable and compelling. The tunes are nice, too, with the aerated ECM sonics serving the music perfectly.
Roger Thomas, BBC Music Magazine