Geir Sundstøl: Brødløs
Hubro

It's significant that Geir Sundstøl's credited with fifteen instruments on Brødløs, the third solo album by the Norwegian composer, guitarist, and multi-instrumentalist: when all's said and done, the thing that stands out more than anything is the album's sonic richness. Approaching his songs like a landscape painter, Sundstøl adds micro-detail with care, his choices exemplifying a fine-tuned sensitivity to different instrument timbres. Pedal steel is prominent, but he also plays everything from Shankar guitar, mandolin, and banjo guitar to harmonica, marxophone, and cümbüs.

The sound palette doesn't end with him either: he's joined by a number of others, many of whose names will be familiar to fans of Norwegian jazz: drummer Erland Dahlen, keyboardist David Wallumrød, bassists Mats Eilertsen (acoustic) and Jo Berger Myhre (electric, bass synth), trumpeter Nils Petter Molvær, and tablaist Sanskriti Sheresta. Some play multiple instruments, with Dahlen, for example, supplementing drums with numerous percussion instruments, including steel drum, xylophone, dulcimer, musical saw, handbells, and metal plates. Add it all up and you've got an exceptionally satisfying follow-up to 2015's Furulund and 2016's Langen ro.

That's not all Brødløs has going for it. Sundstøl's seven originals are memorable (one co-written with Myhre and another Myhre and Wallumrød), and his decision to meld Bowie and Eno's “Warszawa” with Coltrane's “Alabama” is not only inspired but a must-hear. The spiritual material the saxophonist composed after the 1963 Birmingham, Alabama church bombing by the Ku Klux Klan that killed four black girls and injured many others seamlessly melds with those now-familiar haunting melodies from Low. It's hard not to be reminded of Ry Cooder when Sundstøl, his picking augmented by tablas and a resonant drone, voices Coltrane's sorrowful melody, and while these versions won't displace the originals from their respective perches, they're credible re-imaginings that demonstrate how malleable they are to interpretation.

Sundstøl, who's appeared as a sideman on nearly 300 albums and toured with acts as diverse as A-ha and Petter-Molvær, set out wanting Brødløs to be a “sad album.” That being said, the material, which he recorded at his own home studio, might be sad in way (the quality emerges perhaps most noticeably during the sombre “Læms”), but it's not depressing; instead, a strain of melancholy runs through it, and as such anyone expecting ecstatic ravers will come away empty-handed. In places, there's a distinctly American feel to the atmospheric material, especially when the combination of harmonica and pedal steel so vividly evokes the desert plains of Texas, yet Brødløs also ventures farther afield in those moments where Molvær's trumpet and Sheresta's tablas surface. Admittedly the homage is undoubtedly the most striking thing on the album, yet the other pieces aren't far behind.

December 2018