Lena Willemark, Ale Möller

Agram is the second album of the Nordan Project, the group led by singer and fiddler Lena Willemark and multi-instrumentalist Ale Möller, and the follow-up to Nordan from 1994. Its leaders call it "a meeting-place for Swedish folk musicians and musicians from the world of improvisation". The songs come from the Swedish tradition, some of them centuries old, alongside new pieces by the two leaders, all arranged by Möller.

The record was made at Rainbow Studio in Oslo between 30 March and 3 April 1996, produced by Manfred Eicher with Jan Erik Kongshaug as engineer. Willemark and Möller had met Eicher by chance in 1992, at a folk festival where he was attending an Arvo Pärt premiere. Willemark sings, plays fiddle and viola and uses the herding call she learned growing up in Evertsberg, a forest village in mid-west Sweden. Möller plays mandola, hammered dulcimer, folk harp, lute, shawm, natural flutes and wooden trumpet. Bassist Palle Danielsson, drone fiddler Mats Edén, saxophonist Jonas Knutsson and a percussionist complete the group.

In the title song, a Willemark original, the voice lies over hammered dulcimer, drone fiddle and soprano saxophone. Björnen sets a traditional text to music by Möller, with herding calls, wooden trumpet, baritone saxophone and voices from most of the band. The album closes with Simonpolskan, a polska by Möller and Edén dedicated to their teacher, the fiddler Simon Simonsson. ECM's notes hear in Edén's drone fiddle echoes of the North Indian sarangi and of Scottish pibroch, and in places of Coltrane.

Folk Roots once compared Willemark and Knutsson playing together to "two birds in a windblown sky". JazzTimes described Agram as "clearly Northern European music but with cultural arms outstretched". The two leaders had known each other since 1984 and also played together in the trio Frifot. Möller had spent years in Greek music, rembetika included, before turning to Swedish folk in the early 1980s and learning from traditional players in Dalarna. Willemark studied at the conservatory in Stockholm, where she began working with jazz musicians, Knutsson among them.

This is the CD edition, ECM 1610, first released in September 1996, with a 20-page booklet.