Sinikka Langeland

Wind And Sun sets poems by the Norwegian writer Jon Fosse for the kantele player and singer Sinikka Langeland and a quintet of Norwegian musicians, each of them an ECM bandleader. Her music runs from archaic folk forms to open improvisation, and here the Finnish kantele and the Jew's harp meet trumpet, saxophones, bass and drums. Fosse's spare verse, which wrestles with questions of faith, sits close to Langeland's interest in what she calls "natural mysticism".

The band is Mathias Eick on trumpet, Trygve Seim on tenor and soprano saxophones, Mats Eilertsen on double bass and Thomas Strønen on drums, with Langeland on vocals, kantele and Jew's harp. She plays three kanteles here, with five, fifteen and thirty-nine strings. According to the Financial Times, the line-up first came together for a concert marking her sixtieth birthday. The album was recorded at Rainbow Studio in Oslo in June 2022, with Martin Abrahamsen engineering. It was mixed at Bavaria Musikstudios in Munich by Langeland, Michael Hinreiner and Guido Gorna, who also produced it.

It Walks And Walks is built on a walking bass line from Eilertsen, with voice, trumpet and saxophone pulling the melody with and against the meter, and the lightly plucked kantele ringing like a steel guitar. When The Heart Is A Moon is a ballad that opens with kantele and voice before the bass enters, with Eick's trumpet in front. Wind Song starts from a Jew's harp ostinato, the base for playful exchanges between Eilertsen and Strønen.

In the Financial Times, David Honigmann placed Fosse, from the rural west of Norway, beside Langeland, from Finnskogen on the Swedish border, and found that they share "folk culture, the force of grace and the power of absences". Timothy Monger at AllMusic described the twelve songs as "at turns pensive, playful, and affectionate". Fosse received the Nobel Prize in Literature in October 2023, shortly after the album came out. In Jazz Views, Nick Lea pointed to Seim's soprano saxophone as a second storyteller beside her voice, with Eick as his foil.

This is the CD edition, ECM 2776, released on 15 September 2023. The booklet prints the song texts in English translation by May-Brit Akerholt.