Here is another beautiful set from the Norwegian folk singer and Finnish-harp specialist Sinikka Langeland. It’s comparable to 2015’s The Half-Finished Heaven in its balance of jazz suppleness (her Starflowers group is a star-packed contemporary jazz band) and poetic lyricism steered by a fascination with the natural world. But it’s also augmented by the hymnal harmonies of vocalists Trio Mediaeval.
Themed around the ancient heaven-meets-earth concept of the axis mundi, it’s a stream of entrancing sound in which long, ringing harp tones drift across vocal laments and thudding low drumbeats. Trygve Seim’s shy sax interjections cross restrained bass and drums grooves, and Arve Henriksen unfolds slow motifs with a stately hipness reminiscent, on the rhythmically floating Jacob’s Dream, of the Miles Davis Sketches of Spain classic Solea.
Langeland is sometimes crisply talkative, sometimes ethereally lost in a dream, and Henriksen’s vaporous dialogue with her on the gliding Karsikko is gently dazzling. It’s a folk album, sung in Langeland’s Finnskogen dialect, but so open to jazz conversations that its audience stretches far wider.
