A Place Called Home Oddgeir Berg Trio

• 1Into the Mountains (Sula)03:40
• 2As We Wander Around03:05
• 3Circles05:35
• 4Perpetuum Mobile04:07
• 5Triste04:16
• 6Hommage (Dance Like Nobody's Watching)03:27
• 7Song for My Mother04:42
• 8Happiness Is Where You Are03:12
• 9Where the Sun Never Sleeps04:35
• 10Epilogue01:54
• Total Runtime38:33

Info for A Place Called Home

The island of Rolla is tiny and sparsely populated - a mere 900 people live here. On A Place Called Home, Oddgeir Berg takes us to this, his father's birthplace, for a concept album about the magic of nature, the spaces hidden in memory, and the bonds that family provides.

The music was written with a new trio line-up and during a period of personal turmoil, including a cancer diagnosis for Berg's mother, and the worries which accompanied her treatment. As one would expect, the music feels intimate and pastoral, mostly slower-paced and introspective.

But there are also moments of gentle exploration here as well as a beautiful bass solo by new member Audun Ramo. It is an invitation to a journey – to make any place your home.

Oddgeir Berg, keyboards
Audun Ramo, double bass
Lars Berntsen, drums

Oddgeir Berg Trio
Electroacoustic jazz with one leg in melancholy and the other in ecstasy

Jazz trios named after the piano player give certain expecations, be it Horace Silver and his tender "Que Pasa" or Esbjørn Svensson and his Northern sounds, clarity and intimacy are common to these, with a hint of tonal melancholy.

These characteristics also feature on "Before Dawn", the debut album from The Oddgeir Berg Trio, who are clearly familiar with a Scandinavian jazz tradition. Tunes such as "The Mermaid’s Dance" and "Springeren" summon images of bonfires by the sea lit to herald the summer solstice, and the inevitable turn of the season when Autumn arrives and buries its roots and turns with fine melodic lines into the silence of winter.

The trio has some other tricks up its sleeve though, most importantly an urgency for action, pace and adventure, best heard in "A.C.M" and "Slogro" with their rhythmic relocations and aggressive radiance. Here the Oslo based trio has more in common with Miles Davis’ Jack Johnson than Scandinavia’s Jan Johannson. The Jimi Hendrix rock sound of the doublebass and the propulsive drum sound energetically support Berg’s playing. Berg’s curiosity in experimenting with Wurlitzer\Rhodes and synthesizer sounds sneaks into the soundscape and lends a distinctive colour to the sound panorama.

Booklet for A Place Called Home