George Russell

Listen to the Silence, subtitled A Mass for Our Time on this CD, is the work George Russell wrote on commission from the Norwegian Cultural Fund for the 1971 Kongsberg Jazz Festival, specifically for performance in Kongsberg Church. What you hear is the premiere, recorded live in the church on June 26, 1971. The music first came out in 1973 on Concept Records, with Russell as producer, and Soul Note reissued it in 1983 in a new remastering made at Polygram in Tribiano, near Milan, in June of that year.

The choir is the Chorus of the Musikk Konservatoriet of Oslo, conducted by Arnuv Hegstad, with a supplementary chorus from the New England Conservatory of Music, the Boston school where, according to WBUR, Russell had taught since 1969. Nine solo voices are credited, among them bass Dan Windham, who is also listed as a soloist. Around the singers is a band with Jan Garbarek on tenor saxophone, Terje Rypdal on electric guitar, Bobo Stenson on electric piano, Arild Andersen on acoustic bass, Jon Christensen on percussion and Stanton Davis on trumpet, with an electric bassist and an organist; Russell is credited as composer and arranger and on timpani. Jan Erik Kongshaug engineered the concert. Special effects were added at Aengus Recording Studios in Fayville, Massachusetts, in April 1973, and Bob Ludwig mastered the original issue. The piece runs about 45 minutes and was split into two parts of roughly 22 minutes on the first LP; on this CD it is presented as a single work in four sections.

This is the Soul Note CD 121024-2, which Discogs lists as a reissue of the album first released by Concept Records in 1973 and issued by Soul Note in 1983 as SN 1024.