KARL SEGLEM
Nye Nord NORCD0246
"Karl Seglem´s music is one of the best examples of a specifically Norwegian phenomenon: an open airy music that has grown up in the past 20 or so years, in which the melodies and unsquare rhytms of traditional song and fiddling have come together with new Nordic jazz, which while it involves sax players has virtually no connection with American jazz. It also shows the sort of unfettered exploration of sounds and textures that is usually associated with avant-garde music. Saxophonist Jan Garbarek is of course well known for this kind of thing, but while he has many and varied projects, only some of which are part of new Norwegian music, Seglem is more continuously involved in it, in his work with a variety of musicians and with his NORCD record label.
Nye Nord is both a progression and a summary of his opus. On it, Seglem has written all the music apart from one traditional song tune, but the open, natural-scale shapes of tradition seem to wave through it, sometime surfacing, sometimes as an underlying form. He plays tenor sax and tungehorn (an animal horn with a reed), and there are appearances by the other members of Utla. Isungset´s jew´s-harp playing is particulary notable, for example as an almost synth-like continuo over his organic persussion between Seglem´s tenor and Bjørn Kjellemyr´s double bass in Grøn Eld. With them are a team including Christian Wallumrød on electric piano, electric and acoustic guitarist Morten Sæle, synthist and programmer Reidar Skår and drummer Stein Inge Brækhus. Male singer Odd Nordstoga delivers six songs, and there are also vocals from Berit Opheim and Unni Løvlid.
Seglem, depending on who he´s playing with, at times works on the wilder edges of musical exploration (a recent collaboration in London involved a player of bowed bicycle-wheel), but this album is in no way "difficult". It´s full of structured songs, melodiousness and interesting grainy, hefty and spacious textures."
KARL SEGLEM
Nye Nord NORCD0246
Reviewed by Andrew Cronshaw, fRoots nr. 242/243 Aug/sept 2003.
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