Mats Eilertsen - Reveries and Revelations

Star bassist and HUBRO veteran Mats Eilertsen presents his innovative cut and paste solo project featuring cameos from a supergroup of guests including Arve Henriksen, Eivind Aarset, Geir Sundstøl, Thomas Strønen and Per Oddvar Johansen

“It is a sort of solo album, I guess, but not in the way I would normally do it”, Mats Eilertsen says. “I wanted to do something that came out of the bass itself. Whereas normally I would record a lot of tracks and see what I had in the end, but more or less as they were played, this one is produced, cut, edited and layered from the beginning." Eilertsen is well-established as one of Norway’s most internationally recognised jazz musicians, as well as one of Europe’s leading double bass players. He has been with HUBRO since its inception ten years ago, as well as enjoying a long relationship with ECM. His new album is an unusually constructed self-build project whose contents were put together (“arranged and assembled” is the credit on the sleeve) by Eilertsen using contributions recorded separately by each of his chosen cast of collaborators. "It’s me fooling around in a way I haven’t done myself before, and also playing organ, some guitar and additional stuff. Then I imagined some musicians that I would like to have adding their own touch to it.”

That the guest musicians are all stars in their own right shows the high regard in which Eilertsen is held by his peers. Their impeccable credentials as experimental artists working with the interplay between sound and music also gives us a strong clue as to the intended direction of the project as a whole. Geir Sundstøl adds guitars and banjo to two tracks while guitarist Eivind Aarset and percussionist Per Oddvar Johnansen play on one track each. The remaining two guests represent, together with Eilertsen, three quarters of the original line-up of the influential band Food (the missing link is the English saxophonist Iain Ballamy), whose self-titled debut album ('Food', Feral Records, 1999), edited from two live performances at the Molde Jazz Festival in 1998, became a landmark jumping-off point for the 'new wave' of Nordic and European improvisation that is still in progress. Thomas Stronen’s percussion and electronics feature on three tracks, and Arve Henriksen’s inimitable trumpet voice is heard on the album’s beautiful closing piece, ‘Appreciate’.