Jon Balke, Amina Alaoui, Jon Hassell, Kheir Eddine M’Kachiche, Bjarte Eike

Siwan is a project of the Norwegian pianist and composer Jon Balke with the Moroccan singer Amina Alaoui, released by ECM in May 2009. Balke started from the kinship he heard between Andalusian music, early baroque music and jazz, all of which leave room for improvisation. Here these traditions meet in settings of poems by Sufi poets, Christian mystics and troubadours. The title is a word for balance or equilibrium in Aljamiado, a Latin-Arabic hybrid language of medieval Andalusia. The record won a Jahrespreis of the German record critics.

The music was commissioned by Cosmopolite, the Oslo stage for music from many cultures. Alaoui and the violinist Kheir Eddine M'Kachiche were part of it from the start, and Jon Hassell joined as guest soloist on trumpet and electronics. The strings, lute and harpsichord come from Barokksolistene, the baroque ensemble led by violinist Bjarte Eike, with two percussionists, one of them on the Persian zarb. Balke conducts and plays keyboards. The album was recorded between September 2007 and May 2008 at Rainbow Studio in Oslo and produced by Manfred Eicher with Balke.

Nine of the eleven pieces set texts adapted by Alaoui, who also co-wrote the melodies. The two instrumentals, Tuchia and Zahori, are Balke's alone, and Tuchia opens the album with a solo violin over the strings. They range from the Andalusian poets Ibn Khafaja and Al-Mu'tamid Ibn Abbad to the troubadour Martín Codax, Lope de Vega and St John of the Cross. Ya Safwati opens with Hassell's muted trumpet before the strings and voice pick up the tempo. In the ten-minute Thulâthiyat, on words by Al-Hallaj, Alaoui is carried mainly by M'Kachiche's violin. The closing Toda ciencia trascendiendo, over twelve minutes long, sets St John of the Cross in Spanish.

In Jazzwise, Stuart Nicholson called it "a vast, simmering soundtrack for a movie yet to be made". Peter Bacon of The Jazz Breakfast stressed the group rather than the soloists: "not a music of individual prowess as much as incredible interactive group subtlety". In Germany, Jazzthetik described the result as a folklore imaginaire, an invented tradition that still holds the listener.

This is the CD edition, ECM 2042, first released in 2009.