Arild Andersen Quartet - Green Shading Into Blue (1978) LP

1978 was a year of dubious compromise in jazz. Great musicians succumbed to prevailing music industry wisdom that to move forward one had to cross over to new audiences. Only after going over did players discover there was often little there on the other side. Arild Andersen's 1978 LP, Green Shading Into Blue, suggests that a Scandinavian strain of the crossover malaise was afflicting the Oslo studios used by Manfred Eicher's ECM label. Andersen's quartet on this release is the same as the one heard on the Norwegian bassist's bleak and melancholy 1976 LP, Shimri. This is an outstanding group of individual talents who can communicate musically with one another at the highest level. For the 1978 follow-up, though, incongruous elements have now been grafted on here and there: occasional bits of string synthesizer, "soft rock" riffing, passages of sensitive, new age noodling. The result is neither particularly commercial, nor especially good jazz, relative to the players who made it. Also troubling is the quartet's tendency to power down in the middle of a good piece to indulge in interludes of inconsequential introspection. This curious tactic strikes the title track, which, although borrowing promisingly from Miles Davis's serenely funky "Mademoiselle Mabry" (Filles de Kilimanjaro), ends up sounding enervated and unsure of itself. The most successful track, Andersen's "Radka's Samba," is, however, performed with flair and originality. If it is any consolation to Andersen and company, they were not alone in making ill-conceived tradeoffs to reach a wider audience. In 1978, many otherwise wonderful players were engaged in similar moves. Fortunately, a good many of them returned to jazz to pick up the threads of where they left off.