Track Listing

1. Tears Transforming
2. Being There
3. Twins
4. Curtains Aside
5. Colours of Mercy
6. Sentiment
7. Kneeling Down
8. Reach Out and Touch It
9. Edges of Happiness
10. Interlude
11. Token of Tango
12. The Ground

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #26098 in Music
• Released on: 2005-04-05
• Number of discs: 1

Amazon.com
The second album by Norwegian pianist and composer Tord Gustavsen is another set of crystalline beauty. Lyrical in both his writing and playing, the music is informed by his Scandinavian homeland's austere landscapes, as well as a wide swath of jazz traditions and gospel influences from his youth (as a teenager Gustavsen was a church organist). The trio's interplay is supple and subtle to the point of the rhythm section sounding like they're actually a part of the piano. The music's gentle propulsion seems to be carried forward equally by all three players. Emotionally resonant, the warmth and clarity of ECM's high production standards captures every nuance -- even lightly struck cymbals resonate with incredible presence. --David Greenberger

Time Out NY, April 21, 2005
Gustavsen again demonstrates an enviable knack for penning compositions as simple, tuneful and seemingly inevitable as folk songs or hymns.

Stuart Nicholson, JazzTimes, May 2005
"The trio creates music rich with inner meaning and nuance."

Customer Reviews

Fabulous
This is an amazing CD and I would highly recommend. Perfect, relaxing, lovely music.

Early Chico Hamilton: Easy to be around
If you love early Chico records, you will love this. It is restrained, sparse and thoughtful. The Ground is soothing yet interesting music-seamlessly blending in at a dinner party, while standing alone as a singular experience--an hour well spent.

It's hard to find music like this-true and consistent throughout the entire record.

Astrological stars
Other reviewers have articulated appreciation for TG (and the trio)'s work so well. Thank you. This music is soothing, healing and enlightening - simultaneously familiar yet unique. I'll just add for those of an astrological bent that I found it interesting that astrology seems to support TG's aesthetic: with Venus (planet associated with one's sense of beauty and harmony)conjunct Neptune (higher transpersonal octave of Venus) in Scorpio (music as eroticism per TG's words) opposite Saturn (planet associated with ascetic discipline and essential structure of self) in Taurus (a sign associated with music, particularly the voice - metaphor for TG's spare while melodic sensibility). This is certainly an incomplete reading, but an interesting metaphor for the taut balance TG achieves between a freely sensuous, personal, upclose feeling and an austere spacious sensibility.