Crime Scene is an extended work by the Norwegian guitarist Terje Rypdal, written for the Bergen Big Band and recorded live at the Nattjazz festival in Bergen in May 2009. ECM released it in April 2010. Where his 2006 album Vossabrygg partly looked back to Miles Davis and Bitches Brew, this one turns to John Coltrane and Pharoah Sanders. The swirling massed horns of the opening bring Ascension to mind, and the whole suite is paced like a mystery thriller.
Rypdal surrounded his own quartet with the 17-piece big band, directed by Olav Dale. All three of his partners had played on Vossabrygg: Palle Mikkelborg on trumpet and flugelhorn, Ståle Storløkken on Hammond organ and Paolo Vinaccia on drums and samples. The festival commissioned the work, and the concert was recorded by Norwegian radio NRK. It was then mixed at Rainbow Studio in Oslo by Jan Erik Kongshaug, Manfred Eicher and Rypdal himself.
The fourteen sections carry crime-story titles that Rypdal has said are only loosely tied to the music. Vinaccia collected fragments of film and radio-play dialogue and laid them into the mix, which gives the record its noir colour. Clint - The Menace sets a sampled Clint Eastwood against brooding bass clarinets, reeds and brass. In Don Rypero a steady beat finally arrives and the guitar takes off in a long, soaring solo. Investigation rises out of darkness into the most intense ensemble playing on the disc, with Mikkelborg's electric trumpet and Storløkken's organ at full stretch. Vinaccia's own Parli con me?! is a collage of speech and sound held together by his drums.
In The Guardian, John Fordham described "slow-thrashing free jazz" meeting churning funk and rock grooves, and called the album "a good match of orchestral ambition and guitar-rock directness". Ray Comiskey in The Irish Times noted that none of the elements was new in itself, but found Rypdal's way of combining them compelling and imaginative. He also singled out the Coltrane-influenced tenor saxophone solos from the big band.
This is the CD edition, ECM 2041, first released in 2010.
