Emil Brandqvist Trio - Within a Dream (2018)

×

Emil Brandqvist Trio - Within a Dream (2018)

Close

As a narrative tale, the way the Emil Brandqvist Trio has evolved reads like a dream come true. The current chapter is appropriately titled “Within A Dream”, the fourth album they have recorded on SKIP Records. Plenty of attention has been bestowed upon the ensemble lined up around drummer Emil Brandqvist from Gothenburg, Sweden: an ECHO JAZZ nomination, Longlist for the German Music Critics’ Award and, most recently, a No. 7 ranking on the German Jazz Charts for the preceding album, “Falling Crystals”. Enthusiastically received gigs at the Palatia Jazz and Gezeitenkonzerte festivals, numerous sold-out club concerts and a series of joint appearances together with Max Moor in the course of Jazz & Literature events have ensured that they are first-tier players in Germany when talk revolves around the piano trio genre. The audience feedback at the jazzahead! trade fair & festival 2017 in Bremen verified that their performance made a distinct mark on the entire scheduled showcase program. The result: a big bunch of booking queries, but this time from abroad. And the facts: live appearances at the Conversations Festival in Ireland, “Jazz Au Plateau Picard” in Paris, and the Nordic Culture Festival in Seoul enabled the trio to convince on an international scale, too.

If there’s a secret to this trio, it surely lies in the rare talent to have developed a sound all their own. The hallmarks include intricate audiophonic paintings by none other than Emil Brandqvist on drums, neo-classicistic elements from Finnish pianist Tuomas A. Turunen – sometimes sensitively dashed & daubed, other times a product of racing runs that roll away into the beyond – and the almost stoically advancing strength heard in the playing of Max Thornberg on upright bass. By the way, it wasn’t too long ago that Tuomas A. Turunen released a highly expressive solo CD on SKIP (SKP 9139 “Ornaments Of Time”). Though most of the compositions are by Brandqvist, this time several by Turunen and Thornberg accompany the trio on its imaginatively laced journey, and without generating clefts in the trio’s unique soundscapes.

As was already the case on “Seascapes”, the second album, Emil Brandqvist again employs bass clarinets, flutes and even synthesizer accents he plays himself to give greater clarity to the atmosphere felt in the compositions. Options like these are equally used to make surprising extensions within the pieces possible, yet never as solo instruments, always as a pointed element toward enhancing the mood. Ever the romantic, Tuomas A. Turunen shines with his sparkling, poetic input, only to change pace and act as the solid rhythmic foundation for the ‘catchy’ compositional elements.

Once listeners have felt their way into the cosmos of the trio on “Stay A Little Longer”, where the instruments mirror the title via gradual introduction including a little Celesta stardust, “Starlings” presents the typical Emil Brandqvist Trio sound. On “View From Above” the synthesizer plays a more distinctive and even unexpected role before the tempo picks up remarkably in the composition by Tuomas A. Turunen entitled “Metropol Round”. A decidedly tricky rhythm makes “Landscapes” one of the highlights on the album, while “Back On The Ground” delivers a late-night blues of the sort you wouldn’t necessarily expect to hail from Scandinavia. “Time For A Change”, the finale and a composition jointly written by Turunen and Thornberg, has all the makings of the closing soundtrack to a feature-length film that kept you riveted to your seat.