Mathias Eick Midwest LP (Vinyl)

High Quality Vinyl LP!

Mathias Eick reflects on distances traveled in this intensely melodic set of original compositions, which makes an imaginative journey from Hem, the tiny Norwegian village where the trumpeter grew up, to the vast plains of Dakota in the American Midwest. It was to the Midwest that hundreds of thousands of Norwegians traveled by sea in the 19th and early 20th centuries - and naturally they took their music with them. In similar spirit Eick, a Norwegian improviser-composer strongly influenced by North American jazz, here reintegrates some of the colours and textures of his native folk music in these newly-created pieces. In the frontline of the line-up featured here he is partnered by the brilliant violinist Gjermund Larsen, whose roots are in the Norwegian folk tradition.

Trumpet and violin exchange lines and soar together above a brilliant rhythm section with Jon Balke at his most lyrical, Helge Norbakken periodically finding pulses that can suggest tribal drumming or buffalo hooves, and the resourceful Mats Eilertsen helping to drive the music forward. The original inspiration for the album was sparked by a grueling North American tour: “I’d been out on the road for a long time and was feeling homesick. Then we reached the area called the Rural Midwest and I suddenly felt as if I was home. I had a sense of why the early settlers would want to build their farms there. It reminded me very much of parts of Norway.”

"The compositions are all lyrical, in typical Eick fashion, but with Larsen they take on a rougher, more earthen quality. The violinist's attention to the instrument's early, raw, root sound lends balance to these melodies, and the interplay between violin and trumpet throughout is not only alluring, but often arresting...it perfectly illustrates the thematic frame of the journey he set out to portray: that of the immigrant encountering the unknown and embracing it, and in the process, creating a new personal and cultural history without forsaking the old one." -Thom Jurek, allmusic.com

Features:
• High Quality Vinyl LP

Musicians:
Mathias Eick, trumpet
Gjermund Larsen, violin
Jon Balke, piano
Mats Eilertsen, double bass
Helge Norbakken, percussion

Selections:
Side One:
1. Midwest
2. Hem
3. March
4. At Sea
Side Two:
1. Dakota
2. Lost
3. Fargo
4. November

Recorded May 2014