There are albums you listen to, and then there are albums you inhabit. MOLS – The Mols Booklet of Melodies belongs firmly to the second category: a 70-minute symphonic work for jazz quartet and string quartet that arrives wrapped in one of the most lavishly considered 2LP vinyl boxes in recent memory , a genuine artefact, complete with photography by Per Bergmann and texts by Rasmus Theisen, Christian Munch Hansen and Mathias Kokholm. The accompanying booklet is a work of art in itself. Even before the needle drops, it’s clear that this is a labour of devotion rather than a release in the ordinary commercial sense.
The premise is quietly extraordinary. Danish trumpeter and composer Jakob Buchanan , Jazz Composer of the Year 2024 at the Danish Music Awards, moved a few years ago to Mols, the rolling peninsula in southern Djursland whose ancient place names so famously fed Tolkien’s imagination (Helm’s Deep, Isengard). Working from a circus wagon on Thorup Mark, gazing across fields and burial mounds, Buchanan came into possession of a handwritten booklet of fiddle tunes by Peter Madsen (1865–1900), a ‘divinely gifted’ local musician whose family once lived in Buchanan’s own yellow cottage. Four of those tunes are dismantled, mirrored and reassembled here, threaded through ten further movements composed entirely on the horn while Buchanan looked out across deer, hawks and goldfinches.
What unfolds across the four sides is, in the truest sense, Third Stream music , that genuine confluence of jazz improvisation and classical composition first articulated by Gunther Schuller, and rarely realised with this kind of unforced grace. What makes it so quietly thrilling is how completely Buchanan resists the gilded frame impulse. He does not preserve Madsen; he converses with him. A Minor Masquerade in Thwaite opens proceedings by twisting an old Shrovetide masquerade into a minor key reverie, the Artos Quartet, Tue Lautrup, Sarah Lucy Foldager, Sanna Ripatti and Brian Friisholm, laying down a sound world that feels at once Nordic, cinematic and unmistakably new. By Lambhill, Simon Toldam‘s piano has entered like a foal sniffing the air, and Anders Jormin‘s dark, pliable double bass , sometimes pizzicato, sometimes magically con arco , is binding everything to the soil.
The ensemble writing is the album’s quiet triumph. Buchanan freely admits he has written for the strings as he would for winds, and the result is a chamber suite where genre boundaries dissolve almost without one noticing. She Wandered with the Dwarves on the Three Knolls drifts through a fairy tale haze; Suite Dark Ness , a meditation on Mols’s etymology as ‘the Dark Headland’, glows with the lights of distant farms across winter fields. Old Memories Fading, the spiritual centrepiece, is genuinely cinematic, a slow pan across a vanished fiddler’s century. Chris Speed‘s contributions throughout are revelatory: a warm, conversational clarinet on one track, a dry boned, trembling tenor on another, his New York sensibility folding seamlessly into Jutlandic terrain.
There are heavier moments, the stately The Sacred Stones, evoking dolmens that pre date almost everything, and lighter ones, including a delicious Hopsa on Headlandhill in which Madsen’s dance tune is mirrored around itself into something genuinely strange. I Am the Wind may be the most Buchanan ish thing here: Drachmann inverted, a wind player declaring himself inseparable from his element. The album closes with Toldam’s hushed solo reading of The Young Goose Maiden part II, leaving the listener exactly where Buchanan began, alone, attentive, the landscape humming faintly underneath.
A word, too, on the physical object. The 180g pressings are flawless, surfaces shining, free of marks or pressing plant residue, and the recording itself is second to none, silent where it needs to be, with a wonderful soundstage and superb separation between the eight voices. Recorded live across Musikhuset Aarhus, Aarhus’s old town and Tved Church, mastered by Petter Erichsson, and produced by Lars Hannibal, MOLS finds the label holding nothing back: it is everything a vinyl buyer could wish for. One of the most creative, beautifully realised Third Stream albums of recent years, a record where place, memory and improvisation become genuinely indistinguishable, and packaged as if preparing to be lowered into a time capsule, for future ears to be equally mesmerised.
Steve Williams