CD version. Touch of Time is the first album by the duo of Norwegian trumpeter Arve Henriksen and Dutch pianist Harmen Fraanje. Its ten mostly short pieces, just under forty minutes in all, move between free improvisation and carefully written themes. The two players pick up and finish each other's phrases with a closeness of tone and timing that makes the record feel like one long, quiet conversation.
Henriksen plays trumpet and electronics, Fraanje piano. Both had recorded for ECM with the bassist Mats Eilertsen before working as a pair. They first performed together in Utrecht in 2019, as part of the label's fiftieth anniversary celebrations, and had been working as a duo for several years by the time of this session. Seven pieces are credited to both musicians, and three (Redream, What All This Is and the title track) to Fraanje alone. The album was recorded in January 2023 at the Auditorio Stelio Molo RSI in Lugano, with Stefano Amerio as engineer, and produced by Manfred Eicher.
Henriksen's sound is the centre of the music: a breathy, muted tone that often recalls a flute or the Japanese shakuhachi more than a brass instrument. The electronics stay in the background, adding a faint drone or a halo around the acoustic sound, and the piano stays spare throughout. On the opening Melancholia, a slightly metallic hum runs under the mournful trumpet while Fraanje sets out spare, precise chords. Redream, the longest track at almost nine minutes, is one of Fraanje's written pieces, and its slow lines leave wide spaces between the two instruments. Winter Haze, about a minute long, is a spontaneous joint composition that sounds as finished as the notated pieces around it.
The album was widely reviewed. In BBC Music Magazine Roger Thomas described "subtle, aerated fragments that seem to imply rather than state melody and harmony". Thomas Conrad gave it five stars in Stereophile, noting that "purity has its own intensity". Michael Tucker in Jazz Journal heard in Fraanje an impressionist pianist of spare and subtle rhythm.
This is the CD edition, ECM 2794, first released on 26 January 2024.
