Funeral Dance Helge Lien Trio & Tore Brunborg

• 1 Adam 08:18
• 2 Après Un Rêve 04:28
• 3 Riss 06:49
• 4 Funeral Dance 03:58
• 5 Kaldanuten 05:15
• 6 Gupu 06:28
• 7 The Silver Pine 06:17
• 8 Bømlo 03:48
• 9 A Wonderful Selection of Gloomy Keys 04:43
• 10 Sævelid 05:20
• Total Runtime 55:24

Info for Funeral Dance

These are the kinds of things I learned from my teacher and mentor, the incredible Ukrainian pianist Mikhail (Misha) Alperin. Misha turned my world upside down from the moment we met. I was 19 then, and he continued to have a huge influence on me ever since. We didn’t see each other very often in later years, but every time we did, I was filled with energy and inspiration. And in every meeting, he said at least one little thing that I would think about for months afterwards, whether it was during a brief conversation in the academy hallway, or a two-hour monologue in his office. He was intense. He celebrated life and love. He was singing, dancing and certainly living through his music. His death has left a void in our world that can never be filled, and he is sorely missed.

Shortly after his passing in May 2018, I was asked by Hasse Anderson at Maijazz Int. Jazz Festival in Stavanger if I would like to team up with Tore Brunborg for a special concert at the 2019 festival.

Tore and I decided to compose new music together and started writing and exchanging ideas. Eventually, we rehearsed and completed the concept with the members of my trio at that time, Per Oddvar Johansen (drums) and Mats Eilertsen (bass).

The concert took place on May 11 2019, exactly one year after Misha’s death. We continued to play here and there throughout the year, and we started planning a recording. In October 2019 we performed at the Beijing Jazz Festival in China, with Knut Aalefjær and Johannes Eick as subs, and Asle Karstad taking care of the live sound. This was the moment when I realized I had to make changes in my trio; Knut and Johannes joined the band permanently some months later. In the beginning of 2022, still shaky after that dreadful pandemic, we could finally record the music.

Funeral Dance is dedicated to Misha, I even had him in mind when I composed it. It’s not much of a dance tune perhaps, but I always liked such contradictions. I’m sure that Misha would want us to celebrate his life with singing and dancing instead of mourning his death. On this album we do a little bit of both, I guess. I’m forever grateful to have been his student, colleague, and friend.

Helge Lien, piano
Mats Eilertsen, bass
Per Oddvar Johansen, drums
Tore Brunborg, saxophone

Helge Lien
The Norwegian pianist Helge Lien has created his very own, unmistakable style with his trio - hardly any other piano trio is able to maintain the balance between classical jazz traditions and the avant-garde art of improvisation. With instinctive aplomb, he and his musicians have developed their own interpretation of chamber jazz, characterised by harmonically complex, even somnambulistic timbres. Building on Bill Evans' lyrical power and the intoxicatingly melancholic playing of Esbjörn Svensson, Helge Lien creates multifaceted atmospheric images, which he performs with a light hand in constant dialogue with Johannes Eick (bass) & Knut Aalefjær (drums) and which fully ignite their appeal in recordings as well as in live settings. Since his breakthrough with "Hello Troll" in 2008, Helge Lien has concentrated on his own compositions, leaving plenty of room for the unmistakable character of his band members - the ingenuity of this trio truly seems to know no bounds to this day. Helge Lien, who in addition to his own trio project is also on tour with other artists such as Silje Nergaard or Adam Bałdych, already celebrated the 20th anniversary of his trio in 2019 - marked by the release of the double album "10", which was also his tenth trio album. And now it continues: on 04 March 2022, the release of a new, now 11th album entitled 'Revisited' is scheduled (Ozella Music).

The Helge Lien Trio has already received the Norwegian "Grammy" Award (Spellemannprisen) for the album Hello Troll (2008) and was nominated in 2002 with the album Spiral Circle, in 2011 with Natsukashii and in 2017 with Guzuguzu. They have played numerous concerts in Japan, Korea, Canada, Germany, Belgium, Russia, Luxembourg, Romania, Poland, Sweden and Denmark as well as Norway - and now (after the inevitable time of Corona) they are on tour again and looking forward to crossing borders again.

Tore Brunborg
Over the last few decades no country in the world has produced more prominent jazz musicians in relation to the size of its population than Norway. After Jan Garbarek especially the generation born in the 1960s earned worldwide acclaim for what became known as “Nordic Jazz”: Nils Petter Molvær, Bugge Wesseltoft, Geir Lysne, Eivind Aarset and last but not least, saxophonist Tore Brunborg. Brunborg was born in 1960 in Trondheim, THE jazz capital of Norway, and had his musical education at the famous Trondheim Conservatory. Predominantly known internationally for his collaborations with Arild Andersen, Jon Christensen, the Geir Lysne Listening Ensemble and as part of drummer Manu Katché’s current band, he has also led his own quartet, which over the years has featured artists such as Bugge Wesseltoft and Anders Jormin. His new band consists of key figures in the current Norwegian jazz scene, especially guitar innovator Eivind Aarset.

Booklet for Funeral Dance