A transatlantic all-star quartet of modern improvisers influenced by contemporary compositional music and creative jazz, with pieces from all four players--Fredrik Ljungkvist on tenor sax & clarinet, Kris Davis on piano, Ole Morten Vagan on double bass, and Øyvind Skarbø on drums--creating superb modern, unforseeable, and joyful music.
Format: CD Condition: New Released: 2020 Country: Portugal Packaging: Cardboard Gatefold 3 Panels Recorded live at Haugesund Billedgalleri, in Haugesund, Norway, on September 26th, 2016, by Hans-Olav Molde.
"This is the happy result of the international partnership of one of America's top pianists today, Kris Davis, with three of the most in demand musicians on the Scandinavian creative jazz scene; Fredrik Ljungkvist, Ole Morten Vagan and Oyvind Skarbo, who is also the producer and the mixer. In the Inland Empire, compositions by all members are treated democratically with only the bare minimum of bureacracy.
The music is halfway between the written and the improvised, influenced by contemporary classical music, various avant-jazz and more, justifying the name of this album and - from now on - also of the quartet. This means there's balanced measures of elegance and refinement, and what they themselves call "anarchistic outbursts", bringing together equality of functions and freedom of collective and individual expression. "Inland Empire" is the realization of an old aspiration few times achieved, contradicting the notion that Equality and Freedom can't live together. This in itself would make this recording special, but there's more, much more: Something that only the music itself can tell you."-Clean Feed