Terje Rypdal, The Chasers

Blue is the second album by Norwegian guitarist Terje Rypdal with The Chasers, the trio he formed with bassist Bjørn Kjellemyr and drummer Audun Kleive. In this stripped-down setting his sound comes through whole, a singing, echoed tone with long sustain and swells shaped on the volume pedal. The band can act as a post-Hendrix power trio one moment and as an improvising chamber group the next, and the record moves between the two with ease.

The Chasers had made their debut with Chaser, recorded at Rainbow Studio in Oslo in May 1985 with the same line-up. Blue followed in November 1986 in the same studio, with Jan Erik Kongshaug as engineer and Manfred Eicher as producer, the same team that had made Chaser. Rypdal plays electric guitar and keyboards, Kjellemyr electric and acoustic bass, Kleive drums and percussion. Six of the eight pieces are Rypdal's, while Kompet Går and Og Hva Synes Vi Om Det are credited to all three players. The whole album lasts about 35 minutes.

The brief The Curse passes almost at once into Kompet Går, a groove led by the bass with Rypdal's guitar moving melodically over the top. The title track rests on the heavy, thickly wound tone of Kjellemyr's strings, and Rypdal lays his melody over it. The album closes with Om Bare, a guitar solo broken by bursts of synthesizer.

ECM quotes Guitar Player on Rypdal: "His sound is one of the most original and immediately recognizable on the planet." In his AllMusic review Thom Jurek praised the sequencing, writing that "the entire recording seems to unfold endlessly and seamlessly". He found the band untroubled by the limits of guitar, bass and drums. Tyran Grillo, on the ECM Reviews site in 2012, heard it as the counterpart to Chaser rather than a simple sequel. He praised the analogue warmth of the rhythm section and called the album essential for anyone who follows Rypdal.

This CD (ECM 1346) belongs to Touchstones, ECM's series of catalogue albums reissued in cardboard sleeves, begun in 2008. This edition appeared in 2019, the year of the label's 50th anniversary. Blue was first released in 1987.