Skúli Sverrisson with Bill Frisell: For All Your Flowers
The Icelandic bassist Skúli Sverrisson has joined forces with American jazz guitarist Bill Frisell to produce a record of elegance and finesse. The duo first recorded together eight years ago on the album Strata (Newvelle Records, 2018) recorded in New York in 2017. About that album Frisell enthusiastically remarked “Playing alone is so difficult because you get nothing back. But as soon as just one other person plays, there’s a direct response, like an electrical current that returns. It starts to go. You play something and right away it comes back, like a two-stroke engine.” This statement precisely epitomises the essence of the duo’s music, almost like a near-instantaneous call and response.
Sverrisson may not be as renowned in some quarters as Frisell but his curriculum vitae is exceptional. He has played on over 100 records with a diverse range of musicians including Wadada Leo Smith, Derek Bailey, Lou Reed, Laurie Anderson, David Sylvian and Ben Monder. Notably he played on Allan Holdsworth’s Hard Hat Area (Polydor, 1993). For All Your Flowers is part of Newvelle Records’ Ten Collection, a landmark five-album series celebrating Newvelle’s 10th anniversary, pressed on 180-gram vinyl. Alongside Sverrisson and Frisell’s album, Martin Wind, Ingrid Jensen, Elan Mehler and Loren Stillman are the headliners of the remaining four albums.
All the tracks save one (Frisell’s irresistibly lyrical Baby) were composed by Sverrisson and are uniformly dreamlike and captivating. A Little Closer has a baroque feel, Further Down The Road evinces a slow, ruminative sojourn. The title track is one rare occasion when Frisell strikes jangly, lustrous chords as opposed to his deft fingerpicking or single-note plucking characterising most of the album as in Always Late, Always Listening, benefiting from a repeated ever-haunting guitar motif. There’s a keen sense of counterpoint between the two musicians as heard in the limpid Please Continue. A sense of fragility permeates the whole album but is especially recognisable on tracks such as Further Down The Road, where the instruments languidly meld into one. The album’s strength lies in its ability to project Frisell’s lithe guitar playing into the foreground whilst still not diminishing Sverrisson’s lustrous bass lines.
Discography
Thank You For Taking Me There & Back; A Little Closer; Nowhere To Go; Further Down The Road; Here We Are (20.36) – For All Your Flowers; Always Late, Always Listening; Baby; Please Continue; Behind The Mountain (16.25)
Sverrisson (elb, b); Bill Frisell (g, elg). New York City, June 2025.
Newvelle NV040
Kamila Csenge: Behind The Universe
Czechia-born Kamila Csenge can boast some impressive credentials. After high school she studied acoustic and later electric guitar at the Jaroslav Ježek Conservatory in Prague, initially focusing on classical and Latin music and then taking a professional diploma in electric guitar, specialising in jazz under the tutorship of Lubomír Kocvara. In 2017, she graduated with summa cum laude honours from Berklee College of Music in Boston, majoring in guitar performance. During her time at Berklee she earned placement on the “Dean’s List” every semester and received the John LaPorta Award for outstanding achievement in guitar performance. Csenge has performed extensively in various ensembles, appearing in international concert halls in New York, Boston, Berlin and Czechia, and played gigs at Williamsburg Music Center, ShapeShifter Lab and the New England Guitar Festival.
So, whilst Csenge is still relatively unknown internationally, her debut album Behind The Universe makes a remarkable impact. Her playing is both virtuosic and incisive. So, the almost diffident start to the opener The Void soon gives way to some rapid-fire guitar lines, whereas the bass-driven opening riff of Against The Wall is replete with bright, crystalline chords swiftly followed by a volley of single notes. Starting with an ostinato bass line, Music Forever offers an opportunity for Csenge to explore the upper reaches of the fretboard, her guitar at times evincing a timbre not dissimilar to that of an electric mandolin.
Her quartet includes a second electric guitarist, Yamirah Gercke, who, it could be assumed, plays much of the comping but this is not always clear as heard on This World where the guitar solos appear in different channels. However, a more objective analysis of who plays what can be seen on the YouTube video of the group playing The Metamorphosis (Gerecke is seen on the left). Nevertheless, this ambiguity in no way diminishes this excellent, powerful album by a highly talented band.
Discography
The Void; Against The Wall; Music Forever; Guardians Of The Garden; The Metamorphosis; This World; The Point Of No Return (37.03)
Csenge, Yamirah Gercke (elg); Kateřina Vacková (b, elb); Ivo Hermanovský (d). No recording details.
Fat Banshee Records LC 97469
Jay Matharu: Disillusion
Born in South London in 1981, guitarist Jay Matharu relocated to Sweden in 2010 after first graduating from The Academy of Contemporary Music, Guildford in 2000 and then receiving a BMus (Hons) in Popular Music Performance from the Guitar Institute, London in 2005. His academic prowess continued in Scandinavia where he gained a bachelor’s degree in music pedagogy from Stockholm’s Music Pedagogy Institute in 2022 and a Master of Fine Arts in Music Performance from Luleå Technical University in 2025.
Disillusion’s opening track, Atrophy, begins with a deceptively short neo-classical solo guitar intro, rapidly giving way to a proggy vibe underpinned by Christine Lanusse’s sonorous bass guitar and Jacob Johnson’s crackling drums, later joined by Erik Brandell on snarling tenor. But the piece is dominated by Matharu on stentorian guitar. The feisty head of Bare gives way to Brandell’s strident tenor solo whereas midway through Cog, Mathuru’s fluid overdriven guitar breaks through with a cascade of hard-hitting notes. In addition to his redoubtable guitar skills, as in his coruscating solo on Deluge, Matharu is quite obviously a composer of intelligent, well-constructed tunes.
A sitarish guitar sound on the opening to the short Shruti reflects Matharu’s Eastern influence which is unsurprising since he grew up with Bollywood movies; as if to underline this interest in the genre, in 2009 he studied North Indian music under Pandit Sanjay Guha, a disciple of Deepak Choudhary and Ravi Shankar. The piece segues into the catchy Chalo, its rising and falling opening riff prominent and adorned by dynamic solos from Matharu and Brandell whilst again, still subtly alluding to the subcontinent.
Butterflies opens with an ostinato keyboard figure upon which guitar is overlaid and joined by bass and drums to facilitate powerful solos from Matharu and Brandell. The closer, Bittersweet, and at over seven minutes the longest tune on the album, benefits from a memorable theme with a bluesy feel all propelled by Johnson’s emphatic snare drumming.
Discography
Atrophy; Bare; Cog; Deluge; Shruti; Butterflies; Chalo; Bittersweet (34.12)
Matharu (elg, kyb); Erik Brandell (ts); Christine Lanusse (elb); Jacob Johnson (d). Various locations in Sweden and France, summer and autumn 2025.
Independent
