Say and Play is the second ECM album by Batagraf, a "percussion think tank" of Norwegian origin built around Jon Balke and Helge Andreas Norbakken. Its subject is the link between language and rhythm. "Drumming is speaking," says Balke, "and language is a miracle in all its manifestations." The group draws on Wolof, Yoruba, Cuban and Arabic music, where drum patterns can carry sacred texts, metres grow out of lines of poetry, and a drummer's short personal poems mark his identity.
Six years after the debut Statements, the collective returns with a new line-up. Balke, best known as pianist and composer-arranger and a percussionist since the Afro-jazz group Eolén in the early 1980s, plays piano, keyboards, electronics, tungoné, darbouka and percussion. Norbakken, a long-time member of Balke's Magnetic North Orchestra and Siwan projects, plays sabar, gorong, djembe, talking drum and shekere. The kit drummer is Erland Dahlen, known from the bands of Nils Petter Molvær and Eivind Aarset. Emilie Stoesen Christensen, daughter of the drummer Jon Christensen, sings Balke's lyrics in her label debut, and the poet Torgeir Rebolledo Pedersen reads his own Norwegian texts. The music was recorded in various locations in 2009 and mixed by Olav Torget in winter 2010/11. Balke produced it, with Manfred Eicher as executive producer.
Balke wrote twelve of the thirteen tracks, but he stresses that the percussion layers and the final shape of the music were a collaboration. Pedersen's poems ride over spare, archaic drumming on four pieces: Calmly, The Wind Calmer, Hundred-Handed and Winds. Christensen's sharp-tongued English vocals drive Riddle #1 and Riddle #2 against a chorus of sabar and talking drums. The album opens with the short Baka #65, whose title points to the Wolof drum poems, and closes with Norbakken's GMBH, under a minute long.
Peter Bacon of The Jazz Breakfast wrote: "This is drumming as conversation, it's playful and fun". He added that the album grows on the listener with each play. In Die Zeit, Michael Engelbrecht noted that Balke carries the Wolof idea of the baka into a European setting, playful and daring at once, without world-music gestures or conventional jazz singing.
CD edition, ECM 2245, first released by ECM in October 2011.
