**Limited Edition af 100 with 9 prints by Tal R. ** Light arrives as a late, distilled statement from Palle Mikkelborg, long hailed as one of Danish jazz’s most visionary trumpeters and composers. Released on Loveland Music in January 2026, the album was conceived as a kind of personal summation: Mikkelborg reinterprets his own orchestral works alongside two pieces by Per Nørgård and Thomas Laub, not with a large ensemble but in the most intimate of formats - solo piano, trumpet and flugelhorn, wrapped in delicately crafted electronic soundscapes and a handful of guest appearances by close collaborators. The result is less a retrospective than a series of meditations, each one turning a long career’s worth of harmonic richness and spiritual inquiry into something featherlight, transparent and direct.​​

The nine tracks sketch a loose arc from invocation to benediction. The opening piece, “At Tænde Lys” (literally “To Light a Candle”), was written for Mikkelborg in 2006 by Per Nørgård and here becomes a gentle ignition point, establishing the album’s blend of Scandinavian hymnody and open, modal drift. Original pieces such as “Ambient,” “Birds,” “Spring,” “Wind,” “Port,” “Capricorn”and “Drifting” unfold like variations on states of air and light: breathy horn lines suspended over slowly evolving pads, piano figures appearing and dissolving, small details (a chime, a harmonic, a distant echo) taking on outsized emotional weight. The closing “Stille, Hjerte, Sol Går Ned” (“Be Still, My Heart, the Sun Goes Down”), a 1915 hymn by Thomas Laub, is reimagined for flugelhorn, piano, Jakob Bro’s guitar and Helen Davies’ harp, with a choir soundscape shaped by Thomas Li - a quietly overwhelming sunset of a track that feels both sacred and weightless.​​

Although Light often sounds solitary, it is built on a web of trusted partnerships. Mikkelborg designs all the soundscapes himself, treating electronics not as spectacle but as a soft halo around the acoustic core. Guitarist Jakob Bro, who also produces the album and runs the Loveland imprint, appears in key moments (notably on “Wind” and the Laub hymn), his reverb-laden lines threading around the horn like reflections on water. Helen Davies’ harp adds glints of resonance, while Thomas Li’s work with the Vokal Nord choir extends the music into a subtly choral dimension without breaking its sense of quiet. Trumpet, flugelhorn and piano were recorded by Mikkelborg at The Village Recording in Copenhagen between August and December 2024, with Thomas Vang engineering and David Elberling mastering, underlining the project’s handcrafted, close-to-home nature.​​

For listeners who know Mikkelborg primarily through large-scale works like Aura for Miles Davis or his expansive collaborations with Jan Garbarek and Niels-Henning Ørsted Pedersen, Lightoffers a different vantage point. The trademark elements are all present - the lyrical, voice-like horn tone, the spacious phrasing, the sense that harmony is a vehicle for spiritual and philosophical reflection as much as for melody - but everything is reduced to essentials. Silence and decay become as important as notes; the electronics breathe rather than pulse; themes feel less like “compositions” and more like mantras, returned to until they reveal a new colour. In that sense, Light fits naturally alongside Mikkelborg’s explicitly spiritual works such as My God and My All and Going to Pieces Without Falling Apart, but it may be his most intimate expression of those concerns yet.​​

Loveland frames the album as a “final opus,” and there is indeed a valedictory calm to these recordings. Yet Light doesn’t read as a closing door so much as an opening into a quieter room: a space where jazz, hymn, ambient music and Nordic folk inflection blur, and where an 80‑plus‑year-old musician sounds as curious and weightless as ever. With artwork by Tal R and design by Claus Due, the physical edition underscores that sense of delicacy and clarity; each element, visual and sonic, is tuned to the same frequency of stillness. Taken as a whole, Lightfeels like the record Mikkelborg had been moving toward for decades - a late work that glows from within, illuminating not just his past achievements but the spacious, contemplative way he has always chosen to listen.​​