Ante Lucem is a suite for symphony orchestra and jazz quintet by the Finnish pianist, harpist and composer Iro Haarla. Its four long, linked pieces reflect, in the composer's words, on the "struggle between darkness and light". Orchestra and quintet are not set against each other in turns: the writing folds the improvisers into the orchestral sound, and the orchestra into the band.
The work was premiered at the Umeå Jazz Festival in October 2012 by Haarla's quintet and the Norrlands Operans Symfoniorkester under Jukka Iisakkila. The album draws on that concert and on sessions in the following days, all in the Concert Hall of NorrlandsOperan. Haarla plays piano and harp, with Trygve Seim on tenor and soprano saxophones, Hayden Powell on trumpet, Ulf Krokfors on double bass and Mika Kallio on drums. Seim and Krokfors were already in the quintet of Vespers (2011). The music was mixed in Stockholm by Haarla, Torbjörn Samuelsson and Manfred Eicher, executive producer.
Songbird Chapel opens the suite with a broad theme and a tenor solo by Seim that stays tied to the orchestra around it. Persevering with Winter, at nineteen minutes the longest part, is darker and more dissonant. Krokfors's bowed bass and Kallio's percussion paint a frozen landscape while Powell's trumpet moves in and out of focus. In ...and the Darkness have not overcome it... the quintet steps forward, and Seim's soprano takes on a tone close to the duduk.
Reviewing the premiere for All About Jazz, John Kelman heard Haarla's writing move "from maelstrom-like turbulence to deeper melancholy". Robert Shore in Jazzwise found third stream music "so much more organic" now, and praised "big, reflective, redemptive music" with room for Seim's lyrical solos. CJ Shearn of Jazz Views noted the lack of clear lines between composed and improvised passages. Haarla worked with the drummer Edward Vesala in his band Sound & Fury until the drummer's death in 1999, and has recorded for ECM as a leader since Northbound (2005).
This is the CD edition, ECM 2457, first released in August 2016, with liner notes by Haarla and booklet photographs by Marco Feklistoff and John Kelman.
