Passing Images

   On ECM Frode Haltli has been heard thus far as a brilliant interpreter of contemporary composed music – his New Series album “Looking on Darkness”, with music of Bent Sørensen, Magnus Lindberg, Maja Ratkje and others winning a Norwegian ‘Grammy’, the Spellemannpris, and the French Prix Gus Viseur. He has also been heard as an improviser on recordings with Trygve Seim – in Seim’s large ensemble on “Sangam” and as guest with post-free jazz collective The Source (see “The Source and Different Cikadas”).

On “Passing Images”, however, the Norwegian accordionist offers something quite different: a new reckoning with some of the music that first inspired him, and a decidedly untraditional view of the Norwegian folk tradition. Here we find, for instance, a psalm from the western fjords, a lyrical waltz from Haltli’s home village near the Swedish border, a Roma traveller tune that mysteriously evokes Albert Ayler’s sound-world, and much more.

Under the tutelage of Erik Bergene, Frode Haltli came to contemporary music early, but simultaneously, and with enthusiasm, began playing folk music in his local village community. At 13 he was the youngest member of a traditional dance band. The songs he learned then subsequently remained part of his musical frame of reference.

“‘Pre’, ‘Lyrisk vals’ and ‘Passing Images’ are all from the same source. I grew up in Våler i Solør in south-eastern Norway. Long after I moved from my home village I heard a recording of the local fiddler Gustav Kåterud (1882-1941), and both his technique and the recording quality was so blurred, but still extremely interesting in its dualistic tonality and waltz-like tempo that it soon triggered the imagination to find possible ways to blow new life into it. The first result ‘Lyrisk vals,’ (‘Lyrical Waltz’) has been with me some years as a more or less improvised piece for solo accordion. For this CD I made a new version and added viola and trumpet. I also made a shorter composition, ‘Pre’ for accordion and viola, taking the music even further out of the woods. ‘Passing Images’, with the under-title waltz is originally a piece for solo accordion by Maja S.K. Ratkje composed in 2003 with ‘Lyrisk vals’ in her memory.”

Norwegian journalist Erland Kiøsterud has written that “each time Haltli improvises on Gustav Kåterud's ‘Lyrical Waltz’ it is in a slightly new version. With a completely modern feeling for time, we don't know if we are listening to traditional music or modern, cornfields billowing in the wind or waves of big city conversation, we are taken into a meditative, almost sacred holy place, as complex as it is simple, the sounds thrill with collective life and moods, genre boundaries are broken down; with his playing Haltli raises this waltz to a sphere entirely its own, a new musical dimension is created.” This is surely true here, the uniquely constituted personnel of the group, specially assembled for this recording, offering a kaleidoscopic view of traditional music, its perspectives continually shifting...