When ACT boss Siggi Loch asked the three European musicians who created this glowing collage of folksy melodies, Latin-grooving and freely roaming improvisations for their three favourite jazz records, they all included one by Keith Jarrett. These singular artists aren’t Jarrett mimics, but see the piano giant as a transitional bridge between the American and European jazz cultures that had shaped their respective soundworlds for years.
Swedish bassist/composer Lars Danielsson, former Loose Tubes UK guitarist John Parricelli and lyrical Finnish trumpeter Verneri Pohjola came together at ACT’s invitation to record in the warm and woody acoustic of an old Bordeaux wine chateau – Danielsson and Parricelli as old friends, Pohjola as a newcomer who fitted the all-acoustic bill. Maybe they didn’t know that much about wine, but they knew plenty about mingling long-matured musical sensibilities. Danielsson’s Cattusella begins with a gliding guitar line over a muscular bass hook, before Pohjola’s caressingly lustrous trumpet sound arrives. Playing With the Groove is a Latin-hooky dance with Pohjola in nimble muted-Miles mode over Parricelli’s urgent strumming, while La Chanson d’Hélène (a Danielsson adaptation of the theme from the 1970 Claude Sautet movie Les Choses de la Vie) opens as a romantic dreamscape before the appropriate entry of the composer’s quick-stepping pizzicato and Pohjola’s quivering trumpet improv.
