This is an ECM debut for Scandinavia’s Jøkleba, but the fifth overall for the trio featuring trumpeter/vocalist Per Jørgensen, keyboardist Jon Balke and percussionist/electronicist Audun Kleive. That the literary track titles refer to Sylvia Plath, Malcolm Lowry and Ken Kesey, among others, points to Balke’s interest in what cements personal identity and what dissolves it, and mental turmoil is often disconcertingly well represented in this brittle and abstract session’s tapestries of writhing brass lines, anguished vocals and delicate grooves. Jørgensen draws on the yodelling effects of northern Scandinavian joik singing, as well as mixing slithery cat-like sounds with Miles-ballad tonalities on the trumpet; while there are jazzlike passages like the graceful The Nightwood; subtly percussive and rhythmic episodes like One Flew Over; and Balke continues to be a master of the selective keyboard intervention. Jokleba’s music is probably best suited to free-improv listeners, but its meticulous detailing and musicality do have an eerie seductiveness that reaches way outside that loop.
