Mathias Eick

Midwest

(ECM)

Norwegian trumpeter Mathias Eick felt both a sense of longing for home and being at home when a lengthy tour of the US took him through rural Dakota, and he's captured these feelings superbly in this music. A country boy himself - he comes from Hem, which isn't big enough to boast a road sign - Eick empathised with the 19th-century Norwegian farmers who had settled in the Midwest, and his trumpet playing and melodies sing with a yearning, elegiac quality that reminds me of his ECM labelmate, Tomasz Stanko's soulful declamations. He's joined here in a quintet that includes violinist Gjermund Larsen, whose playing from the folk tradition fits Eick's writing perfectly, adding to its bucolic character, and pianist Jon Balke, a similarly simpatico companion in this richly evocative travelogue, who solos with brilliantly melodic invention, particularly on Lost. Larsen's extemporising on Fargo, almost Indian in its searching twists and turns, is another highlight on an album that doesn't need to shout to keep the listener's attention.

Rob Adams