Odyssey: In Studio & In Concert brings back Odyssey, the 1975 double album by the quintet Terje Rypdal later called his first major band, complete on CD for the first time. The earlier single-disc edition had dropped Rolling Stone, the 23-minute piece that closed the original vinyl. A third disc adds Unfinished Highballs, a 1976 Swedish Radio concert unheard until this release.
The album was recorded in August 1975 at Arne Bendiksen Studio in Oslo, with Jan Erik Kongshaug engineering and Manfred Eicher producing. Rypdal plays electric guitar, synthesizer and soprano saxophone, with Brynjulf Blix on organ, Torbjørn Sunde on trombone, Sveinung Hovensjø on bass guitar and Svein Christiansen on drums. In June 1976 Swedish Radio recorded the band without Sunde at Estrad in Södertälje, fronting the Radiojazzgruppen, directed by Rypdal and Georg Riedel.
The studio album moves between icy ballads and long, slowly gathering grooves. Darkness Falls opens it on a single plangent guitar line. In Midnite, almost seventeen minutes long, Hovensjø's bass sets the frame while Rypdal solos at length and Sunde's muted trombone answers. Rolling Stone rides a repeated riff, organ and a primal bass line, with Rypdal's whammy-bar ornaments gradually taking over. Unfinished Highballs sets his themes for a big band of horns, flutes and reeds, with Bengt Hallberg on celesta, harpsichord and Mellotron. Its longer movements, The Golden Eye and Dawn among them, run past twelve minutes and leave room for the Swedish soloists on flute, piccolo, trombone and flugelhorn.
In the liner notes by John Kelman, Rypdal describes Odyssey as “my first major band”, with music that was different too, and remembers the challenge of bringing “the composer and the player” together. Reviewing the box on The Free Jazz Collective in 2012, Stef Gijssels called Rolling Stone “a perfect apotheosis and grand closer”. The ECM text adds that the radio set shows Rypdal already looking for ways to include rather than exclude in his writing.
This is the 3-CD box in ECM's Old & New Masters series, which gathers earlier recordings of an artist in one set, here with previously unreleased music. Catalogued ECM 2136-38 on ECM Records, it was released in June 2012 with a 26-page booklet.
