The Source

The Source is the second ECM album by the Norwegian cooperative group The Source, and it goes back to basics: saxophone, trombone, bass and drums, without a chordal instrument. After years of collaborations with poets, DJs, rai singers, rappers and the Cikada String Quartet, the group finally recorded the quartet repertoire it had played most often. The group's motto promised that no two concerts would ever be alike, yet the result sounds more openly like jazz than anything it had released before.

The Source was founded in 1993 by Trygve Seim, Øyvind Brække and Per Oddvar Johansen, then students at the Trøndelag Conservatory in Trondheim. Seim plays tenor and soprano saxophones, Brække trombone, Johansen drums, and bassist Mats Eilertsen joined shortly before the session. The album was recorded in July 2005 at Rainbow Studio, Oslo, with Jan Erik Kongshaug as engineer and Manfred Eicher producing. "Not having a chordal instrument in the line-up gives us a lot of room to move," Seim says. The early model was Ornette Coleman's late-1960s quartet with Dewey Redman: "I think some of this recording has an energy related to that."

Most of the writing is Brække's. The opening Caballero, a portrait of Cervantes' Quixote with a distant link to the bolero, is as old as the group, first written in 1993 for big band. Libanera comes from the Finnish drummer Edward Vesala, whose idea of the free ballad shaped many northern bands, and Seim learned it while playing in Vesala's last group. Johansen's Mmball, a reprise from The Source and Different Cikadas, brings in the breathy eastern colours of Seim's own albums.

In The Guardian, John Fordham heard Coleman's quirky lines alongside long trombone notes and whispering sax. His verdict was plain: "This may be the most creative band at the sharp end of the north European scene." Rob Adams of The Herald described a style that "moves confidently between tight composition and looser structures while always retaining a keen sense of melody". In Jazzthetik, Guido Diesing praised how varied and colourful the two-voice horn writing sounds.

This is the CD edition, ECM 1966, first released in March 2006.