Terje Rypdal

Descendre is a trio album by the Norwegian guitarist Terje Rypdal, recorded in Oslo in March 1979 and released by ECM in 1980. Guitar, trumpet and drums meet without a bass player, and the music unfolds in slow, wide tone poems, sombre and luminous at once. Long guitar notes, organ chords and the yearning trumpet of Palle Mikkelborg give the record a floating, open sound, with more space than weight.

Rypdal plays electric guitar, keyboards and flute, joined by Mikkelborg on trumpet, flugelhorn and keyboards and Jon Christensen on drums and percussion. All six pieces are Rypdal's compositions. The session took place at Talent Studio, with Jan Erik Kongshaug as engineer and Manfred Eicher as producer. With no bass, the sustained organ chords and the guitar's long notes carry the harmony, and Christensen keeps the music in motion from underneath.

The opener Avskjed ("farewell") sets distant organ and glockenspiel against muted trumpet, then thickens into dense brass and sudden exhalations. The title track is short and focused, built on Christensen's melodic drumming and some of Rypdal's most memorable solos. In the long Circles the guitar cuts through swelling brass and keyboard textures. Innseiling carries Mikkelborg to the album's highest point, and Speil closes the record on a delicate bed of keyboards. Throughout, Mikkelborg uses his electronic effects, wah-wah included, with real discretion.

Reviewing it in May 1980, Jazz Journal's Matthew Bateson heard in Mikkelborg a clear debt to the Miles Davis of the 1960s and 1970s. He found the three pieces of the original side two, Innseiling, Men of Mystery and Speil, full of "majestic textural lushness". But he gave the real credit to Christensen, whom he called a master of textural variation and displaced accents, though he found the slow-moving organ chords of the opening tracks monotonous. Writing much later for ECM Reviews, Tyran Grillo called the album "an elegy in emotional unrest" and heard Innseiling as its most transcendent moment.

This CD is the 2020 reissue of ECM 1144 in the Touchstones series, which returns classic albums from the label's catalogue to print in card sleeves. Descendre was first released in 1980.