Inland Empire - Inland Empire (2020)

This is the happy result of the international partnership of one of America’s top pianists today, Kris Davis, with three of the most in demand musicians on the Scandinavian creative jazz scene; Fredrik Ljungkvist, Ole Morten Vågan and Øyvind Skarbø, who is also the producer and the mixer. In the Inland Empire, compositions by all members are treated democratically with only the bare minimum of bureacracy. The music is halfway between the written and the improvised, influenced by contemporary classical music, various avant-jazz and more, justifying the name of this album and – from now on – also of the quartet.

This means there’s balanced measures of elegance and refinement, and what they themselves call «anarchistic outbursts», bringing together equality of functions and freedom of collective and individual expression. “Inland Empire” is the realization of an old aspiration few times achieved, contradicting the notion that Equality and Freedom can’t live together. This in itself would make this recording special, but there’s more, much more: Something that only the music itself can tell you.