**** The Danish seaside, and its rugged yet comforting past, meld with modern jazz ingenuity on Buchanan's engaging album

BUCHANAN Mols • Jakob Buchanan (flugelhorn); Chris Speed (ten sax, cl); Anders Jormin (db); Simon Toldam (pn); Artos Qrt • OUR 9.70859 (69:12) Reviewed from a WAV download: 44.1 kHz/24-bit

A Minor Masquerade in Thwaite. Lambhill. She Wandered with the Dwarves on the Three Knolls. The Young Goose Maiden, Part I. 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. The Young Goose Maiden, Part II

Danes might know this in a heartbeat, but for the rest of us, Mols is a region of Denmark comprised of several peninsulas on the east coast of Jutland. Because Denmark is, for the most part, flat, the region's numerous hills are a prominent aspect of Mols's geographical personality. Composer and trumpet-player (although he plays the flugelhorn here) Jakob Buchanan maintains a residence in Mols, in a circus wagon, and the region's varied and wild pastoral nature was the basis of this album. The specific musical material that inspired Buchanan was a booklet of folk tunes by Peter Madsen, a local fiddler, who lived between 1865 and 1900. In the words of OUR Recordings's press release, “One autumn day, [Buchanan] tries out the old dance tunes on his trumpet while looking out across the landscape. The tunes turn into hymns, and it feels as if an old soul is reborn floating across the warm, hilly land, a landscape that writes its own silent music on the horizon every day.”
Buchanan invited three prominent jazz musicians to collaborate with him on this project. Chris Speed, the only American in the group, may be the most familiar to Fanfare readers. He also invited the Artos Quartet, a string quartet that works primarily in the classical field.
By now, you've probably gathered that Mols is an album that does not comfortably fit into a single genre. OUR Recordings admits that it is somewhat off the beaten path for this label (no recorders! no guitars!, although they have diversified in recent years), yet OUR also released Buchanan's previous album, Song & Wind, in 2024, and that album earned considerable praise in both Europe and the United States. I have not heard it, but I definitely would be open to exploring it, now that I have heard Mols.
I used the word “pastoral” in the first paragraph to describe Mols, and the more that I hear this album, the more appropriate that word seems. One associates jazz with sophisticated cities and modernism, but the jazz musicians who perform here seldom play in a way that suggests urban, or even suburban, life or lifestyles. The feeling of being out in the sun on a windy day, or smoking a pipe in the vegetable patch looking out over the water on a crisp night, is seldom far away. When the music takes on a more traditionally jazzy sound, it soon passes and makes us feel even more strongly what it must be like to be in Mols. Surprisingly, Madsen's tunes don't get lost, even though they are used in a way that he could not have imagined during his short lifetime. Instead, they hold their own in this musical milieu, in which jazz, folk music, and classical influences (which are the least prominent) meld to create a unique and personal sound. Sometimes other musicians' experiments in fusion come across as forced or overly knowing (“how clever we are!”), but such is not the case here.
My interest in jazz goes up and down; you might say it comes in spurts. I say that only to establish my credentials, or lack thereof, in reviewing this album. I don't know enough jazz to explicate everything that is going on here with discernment, but I do know enough about jazz to know what I like, and what I don't, and there's no question that I like this, and will enjoy listening to it again in the future. I think jazz experts and more casual listeners will respond to this.
It looks like, at least for now, Mols is available as a digital download (which is how I heard it), or as a two-LP set. It is beautifully engineered, and I hope that the vinyl does the music and the performances justice. Raymond Tuttle, Fanfare