Terje Rypdal - Odyssey: In Studio & In Concert (2012) [Official Digital Download 24-bit/96kHz]

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Terje Rypdal - Odyssey: In Studio & In Concert (2012) [Official Digital Download 24-bit/96kHz]

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Terje Rypdal - Odyssey: In Studio & In Concert (2012)
FLAC (tracks) 24-bit/96 kHz | Time - 155:19 minutes | 3,06 GB
Studio Master, Official Digital Download | Artwork: Digital booklet

Norwegian guitarist Terje Rypdal played piano, sax, flute and trumpet as a child – early tone-colour insights that probably laid the foundations for an electric guitar sound somewhere between a flute, a violin and Jimi Hendrix. Aged 28, Rypdal (who played on Jan Garbarek's early albums and was one of the first long-term recruits to the ECM label) formed his Odyssey quintet in 1975, and part of this three-disc set is the band's debut studio album – a mix of dreamy sustain-pedal sounds, orchestral string-synth effects, and bursts of percussion-heavy rocking. The other two CDs (featuring previously unreleased material with Swedish Radio's big band in 1976) represent the beginnings of the guitarist's career as a composer. The pop-song structure of Better Off Without You, represent a very different Rypdal, and the guitarist's nine-part Unfinished Highballs suite is a kaleidoscope of ghostly woodwind scoring and church-organ sounds. It's an intriguing extra chapter to the Rypdal story.

This box set collects Terje Rypdal's two-LP Odyssey album-heard on CD, for the first time, in its entirety - and Unfinished Highballs, a recently unearthed 1976 radio recording that documents the Norwegian guitarist's commissioned work for his Odyssey quartet and the Radiojazzgruppen (Swedish Radio Jazz Group). The complete Odyssey may address a longstanding demand, but Unfinished Highballs will surprise even Rypdal's most committed fans. It reveals that not only were many of the markers which would come to define his career already in place, but the intrepid guitarist was already searching for ways to include, rather than exclude, in his approach to composition and performance.