Ever since it quietly emerged on the international scene in the late ’60s, Scandinavian jazz carved out for itself a distinctive niche. Drawing on the influence of Miles Davis and Gil Evans, Scandinavian jazz embraced a free, spacious, experimental, and contemplative aesthetic. It has also been open to modern or contemporary classical music and collaborations with European folk and ethnic-musicians. This is not OUR Recordings’ first journey into Scandinavian jazz; the critically acclaimed album Going to Pieces Without Falling Apart, with legendary trumpeter Palle Mikkelborg, has proudly taken its place with other genre-defying Scandinavian jazz classics.

Composer, trumpet and flugelhorn player Jakob Buchanan writes music specifically with the musicians he is working with in mind. Joining him on this important project are regular collaborators the Aarhus Jazz Orchestra, conductor Carsten Seyer-Hansen and percussionist Marilyn Mazur. Together they conjure landscapes of beauty, power and sometimes deep melancholy. Mazur’s panoply of percussion functions as an emotional “basso continuo”, speaking a language built out of pure rhythm while Buchanan’s solos emerge almost like ancient cantilations from the choral/orchestral textures. The Aarhus Jazz Orchestra is carefully orchestrated, and the Copenhagen Royal Chapel Choir provides an aura of ethereal beauty to this soundscape song and wind.

In every way, Buchanan’s Song & Wind is a worthy successor to his earlier award-winning Requiem (also written with Marilyn Mazur and the Aarhus Jazz Orchestra in mind), a major work, expressive and full of beauty, drawing equally on the music of the past while charting a further course into the future.