Fanfare 4
*****
Brilliant genre-traversing music from Jakob Buchanan and a supremely talented group of musicians
“Fusion” remains one of the more treacherous words in the record collector’s lexicon. For every genuinely persuasive meeting of musical worlds there are a dozen forced marriages—strings awkwardly grafted onto jazz combos, improvisation dropped into orchestral textures with all the grace of a belly flop. So let me say at once that Jakob Buchanan’s Mols is not merely an exception; it is one of the most convincing records of its kind I have encountered in years.
Some background helps. Buchanan is a Danish jazz trumpeter and composer who has moved steadily from combo jazz into large-scale orchestral works, most recently Song & Wind, which won him Jazz Composer of the Year at the 2024 Danish Music Awards. A few years ago he and his wife moved to the remote Mols peninsula in Jutland, settling on farmland once occupied by Peter Madsen, a local fiddler whose handwritten book of dance tunes Buchanan was given by a neighbor. Four of Madsen’s melodies became the seeds of a 70-minute cycle for an unusual octet: a jazz quartet of flugelhorn, clarinet/tenor saxophone, piano, and double bass alongside the Artos String Quartet.
What Buchanan achieves with this ensemble is rare. He does not simply dress folk tunes in new clothes: the eight instruments operate as a single organism, bowed and blown voices handing material back and forth with a fluidity that makes the seams between idioms all but invisible. The folk melodies are absorbed and reimagined rather than merely quoted, so that the music remains unmistakably Buchanan’s own. His flugelhorn—he plays it throughout in preference to trumpet, gaining a warmer, more burnished tone—threads through the textures with a lyricism that never tips into sentimentality. Chris Speed’s clarinet and saxophone provide a reedy, slightly astringent foil; Anders Jormin’s bass playing is a masterclass in unobtrusive authority; Simon Toldam’s piano is characteristically poised, now spare, now animated. The Artos Quartet plays with a sensitivity to the jazz musicians’ phrasing that suggests real mutual listening rather than dutiful coexistence.
The 13 movements are tied to the landscape and place names of Mols—some translated from Danish into an evocative, faintly Tolkien-like English (She Wandered with the Dwarves on the Three Knolls, The Wall of the Dragged Passage)—and there is a pastoral openness to the writing that earns its keep without ever becoming static. Suite Dark Ness, at nearly 11 minutes the most expansive movement, builds a compelling arc from stillness to intensity and back. I want to single out The Young Goose Maiden, which appears in two guises: first as a delicate miniature for the full octet, climaxing in a terrific pizzicato exchange between Jormin and cellist Brian Friisholm, and then as a closing solo-piano meditation by Toldam that distills the tune to its quiet essence. Between them these two versions encompass much of what makes the album special: collective vigor and individual tenderness, working from the same material to quite different ends.
The live recording, made at the Symphonic Hall of Musikhuset Aarhus, the old town of Aarhus, and Tved Church in April 2025, is superb: the acoustic gives Buchanan’s flugelhorn a natural resonance that renders electronic processing unnecessary, and the balance between the two ensembles is handled with real skill by engineer Johannes Lundberg. This is, in short, a captivating, deeply felt, and superbly played record—one of those unexpected arrivals that reminds you why you keep listening. Dominic Hartley