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Artist: Anders Jormin
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Pasado en claro

The creative partnership of bassist Anders Jormin and singer/violinist/violist Lena Willemark has brought forth special music over the last two decades.  Near the beginning of their association, first given exposure in 2004 with the album In Winds, In Light,  Jormin observed, “How Lena Willemark manages to preserve her local musical dialect and at the same time be so expressive, so personal, receptive and contemporary is a tremendous inspiration not only for me.”  Willemark, raised in the traditional music milieu of Sweden’s Älvdalen region had already demonstrated a capacity to go beyond the frontiers of ‘folk’ in her ECM recordings with Ale Möller, including Nordan and Agram. The work with Anders Jormin became a logical next step.

After a productive collaboration on Jormin’s oratorio Between Always and Never, Anders and Lena introduced a new project, joined by Japanese koto player Karin Nakagawa on the 2015 ECM album Trees of Light. US magazine Stereophile praised its “music of bracing originality, strength, grace, darkness, light, gravitas, wit, and utter attentiveness to each other’s silences and sounds”.

Now, with the addition of drummer Jon Fält, Anders’s long time comrade in the Bobo Stenson Trio, the group has expanded its improvisational range. Many creative ideas are explored on Pasado en claro, emerging from its juxtaposition of sung poetry and musical interaction.  Jormin casts his net wide, bringing together texts from ancient Chinese and Japanese sources with contemporary Scandinavian poetry, also setting words by Mexican writer Octavio Paz and by Petrarch, lyric poet of Renaissance Italy.

The resourceful Willemark sings this cross section of world verse and adds her own songs to the programme.  For all its broad scope, however, the music retains its own group logic through its combining of voice, fiddle, koto, bass and percussion.  The sparse, archaic sounds of the koto, in particular, seem to open up new spaces in which collective creativity can flower. As Anders Jormin explains it: “When each musician’s unique musical dialect, in curiosity and with open listening ears, blends and communicates, something stronger than our four individual voices may awake. Something happens that in advance is not decided or controlled.” The outcome: “carefully crystallized and heartfelt music”.