Christian Wallumrød Ensemble

The Zoo Is Far introduced the expanded ensemble of Norwegian pianist and composer Christian Wallumrød, and was released by ECM in 2007. It is a sequence of 24 short episodes, nearly all fully composed, for a sextet without bass. Strings, baroque harp, trumpet and percussion gather around his keyboards in music shaped by contemporary classical writing, baroque music, Norwegian folk and church music.

Three string players were new to the group. Violinist Gjermund Larsen comes from the Norwegian folk tradition and also plays Hardanger fiddle and viola. Cellist Tanja Orning works in both classical music and improvisation, and Giovanna Pessi is a Swiss baroque harpist. Trumpeter Arve Henriksen and the drummer and percussionist from earlier line-ups stayed on, while Wallumrød plays piano, harmonium and toy piano. Three short Detach pieces are credited jointly to the leader and some of his players. The album was recorded in October 2006 at Radio Studio DRS in Zurich, with Markus Heiland engineering and Manfred Eicher producing.

Many pieces return in new guises, which binds the programme together. The three Backwards Henry pieces are based on extracts from Henry Purcell's Fantazias, and the last of them is extended with drums. Psalm Kvaen, first written for choir on a commission from Musikk i Finnmark, appears solo, as a trio, as a quartet and for the full group. In Jazzwise, Stuart Nicholson heard trumpet, violin and cello merge into "a distinctive, almost vocal sounding, tonal area" around the melodies. The piano, he noted, provides both accompaniment and counterpoint, and he likened the dense, dark writing to a mist hovering over a fjord.

Critics dwelt on how far the music had moved from jazz. Ray Comiskey, in The Irish Times, wrote that Wallumrød had pushed the jazz elements to the periphery in favour of through-composed ensemble music. He called the shifting blend of trumpet, strings, harp and piano "uniquely beautiful". Chris Parker on Jazzreview praised "an absorbing and surprisingly coherent whole", held together by recurring themes. In Jazz Magazine, Frédéric Goaty heard a jazz imagined a little further north, close to an invented folklore.

This is the CD edition, ECM 2005, first released in March 2007.