JAKOB BUCHANAN A Minor Masquerade in Thwaite. Lambhill. She Wandered with the Dwarves on the Three Knolls. The Young Goose Maiden (2 versions). Isles Head. Suite Dark Ness. Old Memories Fading. The Sacred Stones. I Am the Wind. Hopsa on Headlandhill. The Wall of the Dragged Passage. The Yellow Cottage  Jakob Buchanan (flugelhorn), Chris Speed (sax, cl), Simon Toldam (pn), Anders Jormin (db), Artos Qrt  OUR RECORDINGS 9.70859 (2 LPs; 69:13) Reviewed from a WAV download: https://www.buchanan.dk/news/mols-the-booklet-of-melodies
***** Beautiful, moving combination of classical and jazz reflecting the pastoral nature of the Danish countryside.
In 2020 Danish jazz trumpeter, flugelhornist, and composer Jakob Buchanan (b. 1968) and his wife Nanna relocated to a remote community called Mols on the Jutland peninsula in northern Denmark. They bought a tract of land formerly occupied by Danish folk-music collector Peter Madsen (1865-1900) and his son, amateur clarinetist and ethnomusicologist Martin Madsen. In 1904 Martin built a house on the property called the Yellow Cottage. By the time the Buchanans bought the land the house was too decayed to be habitable, so they brought in two trailers and settled in as best they could.
While living on Mols, Jakob Buchanan started composing a cycle of 12 pieces drawing on four of the folk songs Peter Madsen had collected and published. “Around and around within these magical sonic doorways to a bygone time, I wanted to weave new moods, all of it composed on the horn while looking out at my surroundings, my view,” Buchanan wrote in the notes to this release. On his website Buchanan further explained, “These won't be mere dance songs; instead, they'll emerge as melodies echoing from afar, carried over the distant hills—songs in the wind, resonating with the spirit of bygone times (the way you tell your story online can make all the difference).” Buchanan credits local author and friend Rasmus Thiesen with presenting him with a collection of Peter Madsen’s songs copied from Madsen’s own notebooks.
Buchanan chose to write his cycle, called MOLS—The Mols Booklet of Melodies, as a collaboration between a jazz ensemble and a traditional string quartet. Though he’s also known as a trumpet player, he chose to play the lower-pitched and richer-sounding flugelhorn throughout this album. Pitched midway between a trumpet and trombone, the flugelhorn was first introduced into jazz by Joe Bishop with Woody Herman’s band in 1937 but was most closely associated with Miles Davis, who played it extensively on his 1950s and 1960s orchestral albums with composer/arranger Gil Evans.
Also in the jazz group are frequent Buchanan collaborators Chris Speed on tenor sax and clarinet, Simon Toldam on piano, and Anders Jormin on bass. The classical ensemble consists of Tue Lautrup and Sarah Lucy Foldager on violins, Sanna Ripatti on viola, and Brian Friisholm on cello. When I first heard the album, I assumed that Buchanan was playing his flugelhorn through an echoplex, a device Miles Davis used on many of his jazz-rock fusion albums in the 1970s and 1980s. But in our interview in this issue, he said that he did not use the echoplex; the reverberation on his horn comes from the natural acoustics of the Musikhuset Symfonisk Sal in Aarhus, Denmark, where the album was recorded.
What’s most amazing about this album is Buchanan’s skill as a composer in blending the two disparate sound worlds of classical and jazz. Though there have been serious attempts at classical-jazz fusion since Paul Whiteman’s band in the 1920s, often they fall short of their potential because bowed strings, especially en masse, just get in the way of the jazz instruments. In our interview he said, “I did not want to make a ‘jazz with strings’ album”—and thank goodness he didn’t.
As a jazz musician before he became interested in classical composition, Buchanan is able to draw on the tradition of free-form jazz from the 1960s (though he said in our interview that that was not his intent) to blend all eight instruments contrapuntally. At the same time, largely because of the pastoral atmosphere that inspired the music, he’s able to avoid the cacophonous ugliness that sometimes afflicted free-form jazz in its 1960s heyday. Even when Buchanan speeds up the tempos, he’s able to keep the music lyrical.
“The Young Goose Maiden” is presented in two versions, one for the entire ensemble of eight players and one as a piano solo by Simon Toldam. The ensemble version climaxes in an astonishing pizzicato duet between jazz bassist Jormin and string-quartet cellist Friisholm that’s one of the high points of the release.
The opening track, “A Minor Masquerade in Thwaite,” begins with a strain remarkably reminiscent of “America, I Love You,” a 1915 composition by Archie Gottler (music) and Edgar Leslie (lyrics) which was revived for the 1940 film Tin Pan Alley and quite beautifully recorded at the time by Claude Thornhill. Given that, as Buchanan explains in the notes, the place name “Thwaite” (“Tved” in Danish), which means a clearing, “is found all over the Nordic countries and also in England, where Jutlandic tribes likely brought it with them from Denmark,” it’s possible both Buchanan’s piece and Gottler’s song drew on the folk melody Peter Madsen collected.
You really owe it to yourself to hear Mols: The Mols Booklet of Melodies. Jakob Buchanan is able to combine classical and jazz instruments with a lapidarian delicacy that will engage your attention and please you. Definitely, enthusiastically recommended. Mark Gabrish Conlan