Passing Images is the second ECM album under his own name by the Norwegian accordionist Frode Haltli, after his ECM New Series debut Looking on Darkness in 2002. That first record presented him as a soloist in contemporary music. This one draws on his other sides, the improviser and the student of folk music, and recasts traditional material with a small group of like-minded players.
Haltli's partners are Arve Henriksen on trumpet, the Irish-Scottish violist Garth Knox, formerly of the Arditti Quartet, and the composer and singer Maja Ratkje. The quartet recorded at Rainbow Studio in Oslo in December 2004, with Jan Erik Kongshaug as engineer and Manfred Eicher as producer, but the album only appeared in January 2007. Haltli wrote the liner notes himself, and Henriksen took the photographs in the booklet. The recording was supported by the Norwegian funds Fond for Lyd og Bilde and Fond for Utøvende Kunstnere.
According to ECM, the repertoire takes in a psalm from the western fjords and a lyrical waltz from Haltli's home village near the Swedish border. There is also a Roma travellers' tune that suggests Albert Ayler's sound-world. Psalm opens the record at over eight minutes. Vandring begins, as Will Layman wrote in PopMatters in 2007, with a long accordion solo of colour washes and chordal figures. On Ratkje's title piece, he noted, strings, brass, voice and electronics become hard to tell apart. Three short group pieces, Inter, Lude and Pre, sit between the longer tracks, and the Swedish traditional song Jag haver ingen kärare appears in Haltli's arrangement.
In The Wire, Julian Cowley wrote that "Haltli revisits the past without sentimentality and makes it current in music that is both beautiful and exciting". Brian Morton, in Jazzreview, admitted that the accordion might narrow the audience, then called the result "graceful and beautifully shaped, often in dance metres". Kerstan Mackness of Time Out placed the music between contemporary classical and folk, with Henriksen's trumpet bringing in the spirit of jazz.
This is the CD edition, ECM 1913, first released in January 2007 in a jewel case with O-card and a 20-page booklet.
