The Scandinavian project Arcanum brings together four artists all well-known to followers of music at ECM: Arve Henriksen, Trygve Seim, Anders Jormin and Markku Ounaskari. They’ve played together in many permutations over the years, but this is their first album as a quartet. Already hailed as a “Nordic supergroup” in some quarters, the designation hardly conveys the thoughtful, reflective quality of the improvising and the sensitivity of the interaction here, whether playing music composed in real time or taking a written theme to new places.
Ounaskari, Jormin and Seim were all working with folksinger and kantele player Sinikka Langeland when the idea of a new band was first raised: “We’d often play as a trio during soundchecks, which was always very enjoyable, so I proposed booking a couple of concerts in Finland….”, Markku recalls. Trygve felt Arve Henriksen also had to be in the line-up, a suggestion easily agreed to. All four of the musicians had played together on Langeland’s Starflowers album in 2006 and on her later recordings including The Land That Is Not and The Magical Forest, and the Seim/Henriksen association stretched back still further, with Arve already a significant presence on Trygve’s ECM debut Different Rivers, recorded in 1998 and 1999. From the earliest days it was evident that there was something special in the way that Seim and Henriksen were able to bend and intertwine their sounds on saxophone and trumpet.
What, then, are the roots of Arcanum’s approach to music-making? Tryge Seim’s opening composition “Nokitpyrt” offers one clue. Anders Jormin calls it “a respectful bow to Scandinavian role models.” Read the song title backwards and you get close to Triptykon, Jan Garbarek’s seminal 1972 recording with Arild Andersen and Edward Vesala, which opened new perspectives for free balladry and found a spiritual affinity between post-Ayler improvising and Norwegian traditional music. The Arcanum quartet are similarly looking, through the prism of jazz creativity, at a broader scope of music and meaning.
This is evidenced in, for instance, their interpretation of the Finnish traditional tune “Armon Lapset”. Arve Henriksen: “This western Læstadian hymn was widely used in North Troms, Norway in the past. It helped to keep the Kven language alive, as a part of the Tornedal dialect and Finnish church language from the 1860s. We used this psalm as a starting point for a very free interpretation, quite far away from the original habitat.”
Anders Jormin’s tune “Koto” was composed in 1999 as part of a commission for Swedish Radio originally featuring Arve Henriksen and guitarist Marc Ducret, among others. Jormin’s fascination for Japanese traditional music was later intensified through his work with koto player Karin Nakagawa on albums including Trees of Light and Pasado en claro.
Jormin wrote “Elegy” with Arve, Trygve and Markku in mind “on the first day of the war in Ukraine”. It leads into a brief account of “What Reason Could I Give”, which Anders describes as “my favourite of Ornette Coleman’s many expressive and iconic pieces”. The beautiful ballad was included on Dona Nostra, Don Cherry’s final album – and the first ECM album on which Jormin appeared – in 1993, where it was played as a duet by Cherry and Bobo Stenson.
Collectively improvised pieces on Arcanum reveal an uncommon feeling for form. Exploration here is always highly focused, the musicians keeping things concise and to the point.
The band takes its musical concept to the road this autumn with concerts including Krokus Jazz Festival, Poland (October 23), Jazz In Bess, Lugano, Switzerland (November 27), Paradox, Tilburg, Netherlands (November 28), Bimhuis, Amsterdam, Netherlands, (November 29), LantarenVenster, Rotterdam, Netherlands (November 30).
Recorded at Village Recording Studio, Copenhagen, and mixed in Munich in January 2025, the album was produced by Manfred Eicher.
