Anders Jormin

In Winds, In Light is a song cycle of sacred music by the Swedish bassist Anders Jormin, written on a commission for Västerås cathedral. It sets poems by Swedish writers, by William Blake and by Jormin himself for the voice of Lena Willemark. Folk singing, church organ and free improvisation meet in a quiet, grave and open form that belongs to no single tradition.

By 2004 Jormin had played on ECM records by Charles Lloyd, Bobo Stenson, Tomasz Stanko and others, and this album put his writing at the centre. The core of the quintet is his long-standing trio with pianist Marilyn Crispell and percussionist Raymond Strid. Karin Nelson, an organist known for baroque improvisation, plays church organ, and Willemark comes from the folk groups Frifot and Nordan. The cycle grew as the group toured it in Sweden. It was recorded in May 2003 in the Organ Hall of the Musikhögskolan in Gothenburg, with Johannes Lundberg as engineer and Manfred Eicher as executive producer.

The sixteen pieces alternate songs and short instrumental passages. Texts come from Harry Martinson, Pär Lagerkvist, Johannes Edfelt and Lotta Olsson Anderberg, alongside Blake's Each Man and Jormin's own words. Choral, the longest piece at eight and a half minutes, sets Jormin's own text, while Allt rests on Crispell's spare, economical piano, as Rolf Thomas pointed out in Jazzthing. Between the songs Jormin places three short double bass solos named after stones, Sandstone, Soapstone and Limestone. Willemark's folk-rooted voice can caress a line and then rise to an open cry.

Reviewers heard the meeting of genres as unforced. In the Irish Times, Ray Comiskey wrote of "a kind of solemn consistency of purpose, which produces moments of stark beauty and jolting anguish". John Kelman of All About Jazz found that the songs "meld extended compositional form with a more exploratory improvisational concept". In Fono Forum, Berthold Klostermann noted how naturally the organ and piano work together, and suggested that the music asks the listener to attend to the spaces between sounds.

CD, ECM 1866, first released on 30 August 2004, with liner notes by Jormin.