[TR24][OF] Geir Lysne - New Circle - 2013/2014 (World Fusion, Ethnic Jazz)

Scandinavian jazz musician Geir Lysne says he had decided it was time to meet new people, make new music and broaden his sphere of activity when he started planning the aptly-titled "New Circle", on which he works for the first time with a relatively small ensemble joined by a panoply of well known guest stars. Although his ensemble only contains five acoustic instrumentalists, New Circle sounds as "orchestral" as his earlier big band albums. The key element here is Reidar Skar, a "true master of the computer," as Lysne says.
Around 15 years ago, a new generation of jazzers set out to find new ways of escaping the rigidity of post-bop and jazz fusion. Young musicians, especially in Scandinavia, tore down genre borders and borrowed from their own folk music, rock and pop. Geir Lysne's redefinition of the big band concept was and is hardly any less revolutionary. Lysne taught the jazz orchestra an entirely new richness of timbres on three ACT albums. With unaccustomed instrumentations using flutes, percussion, laptop and instrumentally employed voices, and most of all with extensive recourse to world music contexts, a new 'Nordic' and unmistakable kind of melodious stereophony and dynamism resulted for the big ensemble. Although the foundation is only five acoustic instrumentalists, 'New Circle' sounds almost no less orchestral than the earlier albums. The key element here is Reidar Skar, a 'true master of the computer,' as Lysne says. Skar formed this 'electro-acoustic recomposition production' (Lysne) with his alienations and innovative computer sounds, without infringing on the artistic integrity of Lysne's orchestrations, subtleties, double entendres, his predilection for folk singers, ethnic grooves, strong melodies and soundscapes.
Geir Lysne is famous for acoustic big-band composition, but with New Circle the Norwegian original revisits past triumphs with a different lineup, this computer-enhanced sextet, although guitarist Nguyên Lê and vocalist Huong Tranh from Vietnam figure on a long guest list. Weaving brass and high-reeds textures reminiscent of Gil Evans or Mike Gibbs often surf on intense contemporary-urban percussion, and Lysne wraps African and worldbeat grooves around jazz phrasing and traditional songs with a flair that recalls the late Joe Zawinul. The fastmoving Please Welcome! fizzes with lashing backbeats and the riffing horn-section mimicry of gifted programmer of Reidar Skår. African percussion, folk jigs and 1970s Miles Davis merge on the composer's bow to the Jungle Book python, Kaa, and Tranh's haunting tone-bends drift in and out of Lê's glistening chords on A Million Stars. The slowly anthemic 22 (a reflection on Norway's Utoya massacre) represents Lysne at his most patiently eloquent, and if New Circle occasionally feels like a world tour that the computer resources have probably tempted him into, Lysne is nevertheless a composer of real clout, and makes fresh use of them.