In his sleeve note for Gustaf Ljunggren’s and Emil de Waal’s Stockhom København – an upcoming release on April Records – Danish organist Kresten Osgood claims that “As we all know, the concept of strict musical genres has been dead for decades […].” All very well – but what sort of phoenix is currently about to rise from the ashes?
In his note for composer and instrumentalist Mirsaeed Hosseiny Panah’s I Wish I Were Water – released on Losen, a Norwegian label which records plenty of adventurous jazz – the Norwegian composer and professor Lasse Thoresen puts Osgood’s point in a multicultural context. He suggests that “We don’t have to go further than a street in central Oslo to note that fusions between foreign food traditions and Norwegian tastes have been a great enrichment for our everyday life.”
Turning to the music here, Thoresen continues “With his background in Iranian traditional music, jazz and Western modernism, Mirsaeed Hosseiny Panah is a composer who searches for syntheses between Eastern and Western cultural expressions […] he is a composer who has dared to move on from his cultural background without abandoning it, doing so with the clear intention of establishing a new and more comprehensive musical identity.”
Featuring chiefly meditative, rich yet sparely wrought settings of the work of the venerated Iranian poet Ahmad Shamlou (1925-2000) the beautiful I Wish I Were Water has plenty to compel attention. In particular, the measured yet passionate vocal performances are outstanding. But to (my) jazz ears, overall the music has more to do with post-Mahler Western modernism than jazz. Only in Bright Horizon could I detect much of a jazz pulse or accent, in the (in-part) rhythmically assertive string and wind figures which brought to mind aspects of Zappa’s genre-hopping Music For Electric Violin And Low Budget Orchestra, from Jean-Luc Ponty’s King Kong. While I’ll continue to appreciate and enjoy the ambitious and most serious music here, that will hardly be on account of its jazz content.
Discography
The Fish; Romantically; Song Of Wanderers; I Wish I Were Water; Funeral Speech; Bright Horizon (63.24)
Panah (chromatic santur); Amalie Kongssund, Marila Schultze, Njal Sparbo (v); Dimitris Spouras (cond); Tora Røstvik (f); Gracia Ortega Navarro (cl); Espen Nystog Aas (bcl); Jonathan Sandqvist (bsn); Mari Birgitte Bolgen Halvorsen, Kaja Pernille Østervold (vn); Christopher Rossebø (vla); Marek Bienkunski (clo). Oslo, 21 & 22 September 2022.
Losen Records LOS 280-2
