Bjerge, Strand (2LP)
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Recorded over two December days in Copenhagen and shelved for nearly three years, Bjerge, Strand gathers Jakob Bro with Charles Lloyd, Larry Grenadier and Jorge Rossy, and arrives on Loveland Music as a limited double vinyl in gatefold sleeve with artwork by the painter Tal R.
Bro invited Lloyd to The Village Recording in Vanløse in December 2023, bringing along the rhythm section he had formed in 2019 with Grenadier and Rossy, the two players who spent two decades refining the piano trio alongside Brad Mehldau. The session ran to ten pieces divided between Bro's writing and Lloyd's, with the pair joining forces on the hymn "Peace Song" and turning to Paul Motian's "Yahllah". As far as Bro remembers, each song was played once. The tapes were made around the time he was touring Europe with Lloyd and Grenadier behind Lloyd's The Sky Will Still Be There Tomorrow, and they have waited until now.
Lloyd has very rarely appeared as a featured guest on another artist's record, and his presence here follows from his ongoing work with Bro and Grenadier rather than from any label arrangement. Born in Memphis in 1938 and raised on the radio broadcasts of Charlie Parker, Lester Young and Billie Holiday, he passed through the groups of Chico Hamilton and Cannonball Adderley before Forest Flower, the 1967 live album with a young Keith Jarrett, Cecil McBee and Jack DeJohnette, made him one of the first jazz musicians to sell a million records. He withdrew from the scene at the height of it in 1970, spent years in Transcendental Meditation and occasional work with The Beach Boys, and returned through Michel Petrucciani and a long run of records for ECM and Blue Note.
The Motian thread runs deeper than the one composition. Motian replaced DeJohnette in the Charles Lloyd Quartet for their 1968 tour of Southeast Asia, and Bro, Grenadier and Rossy had already convened at this same studio for the Motian tribute Once Around the Room. Grenadier's history with Lloyd reaches back to The Water Is Wide in 1999; Rossy, beyond the Mehldau years, counts more than 180 recordings with Charlie Haden, Wayne Shorter, Lee Konitz and Carla Bley.
"There were so many moments that I look back on, and I feel very grateful for the music," Bro says of the session. "I love the way Charles Lloyd is playing on this album. Some of the songs are very quiet pieces, and when we listened back, Charles said he felt that he sounded different from the way he had on other recordings, and he was very happy with that." The recording, he adds, "was something I never thought would happen in my life."
Mixed by Thomas Vang and mastered by David Elberling at The Village, with cover design by Claus Due. The four musicians will play this music together in public once, at the Loveland Music Festival in Copenhagen. Charles Lloyd appears courtesy of Blue Note Records.
