Tord Gustavsen Trio

LP version. The Other Side is the first piano trio album by Tord Gustavsen in eleven years. The Norwegian pianist had made his name on ECM with three trio records, the last of them Being There in 2007, before turning to quartets and to work with singers. Here he returns to the format with a new bassist, and with a programme that sets his own slow, hymn-like tunes beside chorales by Bach and Scandinavian church melodies.

The drummer is again Jarle Vespestad, a partner since the trio's first album. The bass chair passes to Sigurd Hole, after the death in 2011 of the original bassist Harald Johnsen. Hole draws on Norwegian folk music as much as on modern jazz, and his bowed and plucked lines carry many of the melodies. Gustavsen plays piano and adds discreet electronics, which on Duality and Taste And See form a soft bed under Hole's bowed bass. The album was recorded at Rainbow Studio in Oslo in January 2018, with Peer Espen Ursfjord as engineer and Manfred Eicher as producer.

The opening The Tunnel unfolds over a gospel-tinged left hand, with a long bass solo and very few notes from the piano. Kirken, den er et gammelt hus, a hymn by the Norwegian composer Ludvig Mathias Lindeman, begins with unaccompanied bass and gradually opens into a gentle celebration. In Schlafes Bruder Vespestad's drums set a light groove under the Bach melody, turning a solemn chorale into something closer to a dance. Elsewhere Jesu, meine Freude is joined to the Norwegian hymn Jesus, det eneste, and the closing Curves returns to the unhurried lyricism of the early trio. According to ECM, several of the originals grew out of soundchecks with Gustavsen's quartet.

The press welcomed the return. John Fordham in The Guardian heard a set that is "sometimes swinging and hip, more often tiptoeingly gospelly". Andrew Jones in DownBeat wrote that "the trio's ability to capture doubt, joy and anxiety with a few notes is breathtaking". Other critics, in Jazzwise among them, pointed to the blues and gospel roots of the playing, and to tunes that Gustavsen has described as wordless hymns.

LP edition, ECM 2608, released alongside the CD on 31 August 2018.