Being There

by

Tord Gustavsen Trio

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The one thing Tord Gustavsen's jazz trio has in common with novelist Haruki Murakami is their ability to create dreamlike landscape through their own creativity media. The difference, though, is that in the process of the creation, Murakami will use as many as possible details to blend reality and dreamscape; whereas in the case of Tord Gustavsen Trio, we are only provided with the basic framework for slow and very often restrained melodies, in which nothing is developed into complexity rather than merely the feeling per se.

Nonetheless, this is not to say that their music is lackluster. The trio displayed in their previous albums Changing Places and the Ground, their abilities to compose such beautiful yet not abstract jazz in a discipline which Gustavsen puts, "inspired by a love of spaces". In jazz, sometimes playing a riff in between notes might be easy, but leaving it blank takes up imagination. Tord Gustavsen Trio definitely has this imagination.

Releasing their third album in five years, Being There, as part of a trilogy, the trio has taken their restraint way of utterance to a new territory. When you start listening to the album, the sense of déjà vu will dominate you even if you have never heard of their previous albums. Yet as the music goes on, it will be clear to even long-time listeners that you are not in a familiar place at all. Tunes like Blessed Feet (a Jarrett-like funky tune) and Where We Went (an up-tempo Spanish dance) sing a more assertive but not aggressive kind of lyrics, while the music is still kept as simple and uncanny as it possibly can. The way trio instruments are approached, especially by drummer Jarle Vespestrad, whose plays are being felt rather than heard for most of the time, meshes delicate whispers altogether in modest tempi and continuous rubato. This un-trio-like instrumental integration makes the music feel like dream flows in a constantly changing vista, which finally resolves back to the same place where it started when the album ends with the peaceful tune Wide Open.

All About Jazz reviewer John Kelman put the trio's distinctive character beautifully: "As silence can sometimes speak as loudly as thunder, and insofar as careful elaboration of melody can be just as compelling as more vivid expansion, Gustavsen's trio makes a clear case for the elusive power of restraint." Gustavsen phrases it romantically, that his music is "about loving every note". It is this very tendency of playing what you like, rather than what you ought to play between passages, together with the elaborated yet elegant lyrics of the tunes, that creates this unique aesthetic and the kind of feeling you will not have very often in reality, but in dreams.