TRINITY – Breaking The Mold (2009)

Packaging: Cardstock Gatefold Sleeve

"With a past in hardcore/metal bands, mostly playing the bass guitar, soon Kjetil Moster changed to the tenor saxophone and became interested in crossing jazz and rock with a strong improvisational approach. Specially interested in the ecstatic music of John Coltrane, his personal signature consists in a renovation of the Coltranean stylings. Involved in many top projects centered in Oslo, like Zanussi Five, Fe-Mail, Ultralyd and Crimetime Orchestra, or in colaboration with musicians like Paal Nilssen-Love, Havard Wiik, Fredrik Ljungqvist, Per "Texas" Johansson, Raymond Strid, Mike Pride, Michael Zerang and Nate Wooley, Moster is also the mentor of the project Trinity. His partners in this quartet couldn't be less notable: keyboardist Morten Qvenild is a former member of the band Jaga Jazzist and the founder of the piano jazz trio In the Country, Ingebrigt Haker Flaten comes from Mats Gustafsson's The Thing and Raoul Bjorkenheim's Scorch Trio, and Thomas Stronen is well known from his drumming with Food and Humcrush. With strong connections to the patrimony of jazz, "Breaking the Mold" is innovative, inventive, spelling and vibrant, with the glitter and strength of the most inspiring music coming nowadays from the North of Europe. Don't miss it."- Clean Feed

Morten Qvenild
Kjetil Møster
 Ingebrigt Håker Flaten
Thomas Strønen

With all the respect I have for the Clean Feed label, when I put on this record, I thought, "no, not again", when listening to violent saxes annex electronics, wondering why all this is necessary, even if the album starts quite slowly and relatively quietly, eery and gloomy. But as you grow accustomed to the band's approach (if that's achievable), the quality of the music increases. Again some Scandinavians doing strong things : led by saxophonist Kjetil Moster, the band further consists of Morten Qvenild on keyboards, Ingebrigt Haker Flaten on bass, and Thomas Stronen on drums. So it starts in an interesting way, with plaintive wailing sax against a background of organ, bass, drums and electronics. Slowly the long piece moves into a more tense mode, with organ and sax reacting to each other in small bursts of sound, with interspersed electronics and then, well... all hell breaks loose, as you might have expected. The second, short piece is driven by the electronics and the arco bass, and if it were not for the sax joining after a while, it would be hard to classify this as jazz, yet it sounds good, like an ocean at night, slight wind, no land to be seen. In contrast, the third piece drops you in the middle of a rock avalanche, a weird unrelenting environment from which you can't escape, wondering whether you would even want to. But all that is just the long introduction to the last, expansive, magnificent piece, that drags you along for half an hour of intense musical joy. It starts with a powerful interaction between sax and accompanying instruments, then the intensity drops for some floating mist created by organ and electronics, a barely tangible sound, a backdrop with no foreground. And when the emotional, fragile sax enters, you know you're in for a treat, because of the intensity and the quality of the sounds created, the slow pacing, and the time taken to make each sound come to full fruition and appreciation, but as it goes with carefully built-up tension, it needs release somehow, ... and it does come, gradually, intensifying the silent moaning, speeding up the tempo, increasing the volume, and the explosion does come, expansive, wild, pounding, crashing, screeching, howling, ... What more do you want?

_ By Stef (FreeJazz)
http://www.freejazzblog.org/2009/03/trinity-breaking-mold-clean-feed-2009.html



Links in Comments!