***** Stars: Davidsen's jazz-adjacent song cycle, to feminist texts by a Danish poet, might seem like a dark horse, but it intrigued me beyond all expectations

DAVIDSEN The individual and the entire tissue • Signe Asmussen (sop); Jakob Davidsens Kammerat O • OUR 8.226942 (41:06&)

I knew nothing about pianist and composer Jakob Davidsen, and poet Ursula Andkjær Olsen, when the assignment appeared in my inbox. Davidsen, born in 1969, straddles the worlds of jazz and classical music in his multiple roles. As OUR Recordings tells us, “His compositional output reflects a broad stylistic range, often combining precision in written material with openness to improvisation and performer interpretation.” Olsen, born in 1970, has published many poetry collections, including Third-Millennium Heart, which has been translated into English, although poems from that collection here are sung in the original Danish. In the words of her English publisher, “With black humor and cutting logic, Third-Millennium Heart explores the confounding nature of power and desire, the problem of asserting a feminist alternative without recapitulating patriarchal power structures.” Some of you who are reading this description might have a less than sanguine reaction to it. Well, fear not. I listened to The individual and the entire tissue three times before I read Olsen's texts and the translations, and I was captivated. Once I read the texts in English, I was no less captivated, and my appreciation was enhanced. Olsen's ideas and emotions, and her way of expressing them, are frank and original. If I may be so bold, I consider myself a feminist, but like most men (even non-heterosexual ones) I do not like being lectured at or assumed to be a Neanderthal, and Olsen's poetry, while indeed “cutting,” is not unfriendly.

Clearly, though, it is the music that got to me in The individual and the entire tissue. I hope I do not annoy Jakob Davidsen by saying this, but as I was listening to these seven songs (which probably need to be performed together as a song-cycle, as there are repeated musical signposts within and between them that bind the seven of them together), I felt like I was listening to music that lived within an awareness of one's mortality, in the manner of Mahler's Das Lied von der Erde...but imagine Das Lied in a little jazz club played by combo and sung with quiet intensity by a chanteuse. (Davidsen's Kammerat Orchestra includes, in addition to his piano, a reed player, a trumpeter, a violinist, a bass player, and a percussionist.) In terms of the musical language, however, there is no trace of Mahler, but rather more of Messiaen, so The individual and the entire tissue also reminds me of that French composer's Harawi. (There is a descending sequence of piano chords that we hear several times that reminds me of the Turangalîla Symphony. Perhaps that is accidental, but perhaps not.) The jazz elements in this work are more a function of harmonies than of rhythms, but there are some of the latter too in the more up-tempo songs. Most importantly, this is not one of those projects which aspires to draw upon both classical music and jazz, but ends up failing at both. Davidsen has been most successful at creating a seamless musical language that supports the texts without being dependent on them. Nevertheless, soprano Signe Asmussen is so compelling that one hangs on every note and on every word, even before knowing what the words actually mean. That's a rare thing.
Perhaps this release comes across as a bit on the fringe for the non-Danish listener, but it really grabbed me, so if what I have written here sounds intriguing, please check it out for yourself. On my Want List! Raymond Tuttle