Various Artists (incl. Jan Garbarek Quartet) - Popofoni (1973)

Anyone watching the Åpen Post show on Norwegian TV on 6th March 1969 (which I doubt will include any readers here, but you never know -YouTube link, sorry no subtitles) would've caught a fascinating, bizarre debate about pop music/popular culture vs. classical music/high art.  The programme caught the attention of Arne Nordheim, previously featured on these pages here, and of the Ny Musikk organisation and the Henie-Onstad arts centre.

The plan was hatched (in an uncanny precedent for Ode To Marilyn) to get hold of some prime Nordic musicians - step forward Jan Garbarek, Bobo Stenson, Arild Andersen, Jon Christensen and Terje Rypdal - and have them collaborate with some of Norway's foremost modern composers to produce music that would represent a meeting point between popular music and the avant-garde.  Arne Nordheim, Alfred Janson, Gunnar Sønstevold, Kåre Kolberg and the soon-to-be ECM-ers, plus additional musicians, duly obliged, and a concert of the results was held in April 1970.  Three years later, this limited-edition double album emerged as a document of the project, which had been titled Popofoni.

The six tracks here are certainly fascinating, essential listening, especially if you're familiar with early ECM classics like Afric Pepperbird / Sart / Rypdal's debut.  Imagine these records with a whole extra layer of avant-garde composition/production over the top, and that's pretty much what Popofoni sounds like.

The 20-minute opener Arnold, composed by Gunnar Sønstevold, is a free jazz groove with echo-laden vocals wafting over the top, and occasional organ and tape effects.  Nordheim's two tracks that follow are even better works in the same vein, with the eerie collage of Solar Plexus (his first response to the TV debate) ending in a scratchy, sampled dance orchestra, a hail of gunfire then an emptying sink (or toilet?).  The second disc is dominated by Alfred Janson's 25-minute Valse Triste, where the jazz musicians veer between free playing and lounge pastiche, feeling their way towards the eventual schlager payoff, whilst spoken samples of the TV debate pepper the sonic landscape.  Kåre Kolberg's Blow Up Your Dreams is a more succinct attempt at stretching a conventional song (sung by Karin Krog) to fit an avant-garde frame, and as a closer we get a brief Rypdal composition in which he plays flute rather than guitar.  An utterly essential collection.

Original double-LP cover

Disc 1
Disc 2
pw: sgtg

Surman / Krog / Rypdal / Storaas - Nordic Quartet (rec. 1994, rel. 1995)

Another of ECM's more daring and slightly strange get-togethers - in other words, a perfect fit for this blog.  In August 1994, legendary Norwegian jazz singer Karin Krog got together with on-and-off collaborator John Surman and Norse colleagues Terje Rypdal and Vigleik Storaas.  I haven't heard pianist Storaas anywhere else as yet, and he's a fine understated presence on this reed and guitar dominated set.

Rypdal's billowing guitar is in fact all over the album like malignant, brooding Scandi-noir oppressive weather.  This led some reviewers to criticise how much he dominates - obviously not a problem if, like me, you can't enough of Rypdal's playing.  You'd never guess this album was a summer recording, as Surman too is in bleak, chilly mode; even without that perfect cover photograph this is a full-on zero-degrees experience.  Over the top of all of this, Krog coos and whispers ominously like the cool-headed Nordic detective who's just about to uncover something atrocious on those snowy docks.

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