On Rumi Songs the Norwegian saxophonist Trygve Seim sets ten texts by the Persian Sufi poet Jalaluddin Rumi (1207-1273) for voice, saxophones, accordion and cello. He works mostly from the English versions of Coleman Barks, responding to their musicality and to Rumi's gifts as a storyteller. The result is a kind of art song cycle, closer to chamber music than to jazz, with a Nordic and Oriental colour.
The project began in 2003, when Seim was given a book of Rumi's poems in English. The full cycle was later commissioned by the mezzo-soprano Tora Augestad, a classical singer who had been performing Schoenberg's Pierrot Lunaire with members of the Oslo Philharmonic. Seim plays tenor and soprano saxophones, with Frode Haltli on accordion, his partner on the 2008 duo album Yeraz, and Svante Henryson on cello. The quartet recorded at Rainbow Studio in Oslo in February 2015, with Jan Erik Kongshaug engineering and Manfred Eicher producing.
Augestad sings in an intimate register, and the arrangements leave room for the words. In Leaving My Self the saxophone is silent, and accordion drones sit under winding cello lines. When I See Your Face moves on a march-like figure from cello and accordion, against sinuous phrases from Seim. The one instrumental, Whirling Rhythms, lasts under three minutes. Richard Williams heard in it the fruit of Seim's trips to Egypt and to Rumi's Anatolia. Seeing Double, the longest piece, uses a translation by Kabir and Camille Helminski and closes with an extended accordion passage.
Peter Jones wrote in London Jazz News in 2017 that "Rumi Songs is a thing of great beauty". He also praised Augestad as a singer "able to sing quarter tones and make it sound easy". In The Blue Moment, Williams described a chamber recital in which jazz shows mainly in the saxophone sound and the flexible interplay. He singled out the closing There Is Some Kiss We Want. Not every critic was won over: John Garratt in PopMatters heard a project still in progress.
This is the CD edition, ECM 2449, first released in August 2016, with liner notes by Steve Lake and the song texts in the booklet.
