Different Rivers is the first album under his own name by Norwegian saxophonist Trygve Seim, released by ECM in October 2000. It won the Jahrespreis der deutschen Schallplattenkritik, the German Record Critics' annual prize, for 2001. The music is written for a large, almost entirely wind-based acoustic ensemble. It moves slowly, with closely voiced horns and far more composition than soloing. Seim has called breath the key to the whole project, as an image and as the physical source of the sound.
Born in Oslo in 1971, Seim studied at the Trondheim Conservatory, and in 1993 he launched the Trondheim Kunstorkester, a large ensemble that included many of the players heard here. Thirteen musicians take part, among them trumpeter Arve Henriksen, trombonist Øyvind Brække, drummer Per Oddvar Johansen and the singer Sidsel Endresen, who recites. Accordion, two cellos, tuba and a second drummer widen the palette. The sessions took place at Rainbow Studio in Oslo between December 1998 and December 1999, with Jan Erik Kongshaug as engineer. Seim produced the album with Brække and pianist Christian Wallumrød, and Manfred Eicher was executive producer.
The opening Sorrows sets the pace, a slow lament for the full band with Henriksen's trumpet floating apart from the reeds. The title track was recorded twice with two different line-ups, and Seim and Brække then cut the takes together, doubling instruments in ways no live performance would allow. Three pieces, Bhavana, For Edward and Between, are bare duets with Henriksen, full of bent notes and microtones that reflect Seim's interest in the wind traditions of the East. For Edward is a tribute to the Finnish drummer Edward Vesala, who died in November 1999. In Breathe Endresen recites a poem by Annabel Laity over a hushed, repeated figure for the horns.
In the International Herald Tribune, Mike Zwerin heard "melancholy, lonely, hypnotizing music" from "a sort of slow-floating, pianissimo little-big band", with the shadow of Gil Evans hovering over it. John Fordham made it his jazz CD of the week in The Guardian, comparing Intangible Waltz to "Carla Bley drifting through musical dry ice". When the CD returned in 2019, Simon Adams in Jazz Journal praised the precision with which each instrument keeps its own place in the ensemble.
This CD is the 2019 reissue of ECM 1744, first released in 2000. It belongs to the Touchstones series, which ECM began in 2008 to bring catalogue albums back into print in card packaging. The series grew by fifty titles in 2019, the label's fiftieth anniversary year.
