Parish is the quartet of Norwegian drummer Thomas Strønen, half Norwegian and half Swedish, which brings the veteran pianist Bobo Stenson together with younger Scandinavian players. Its sound is contemporary, yet it reaches back to the improvised chamber jazz of Paul Bley and Jimmy Giuffre, and through them to the early days of ECM. Much of the album is made up on the spot, alongside Strønen's elegant themes that point the players towards free playing.
The group formed in 2001, and its first album, Rica, was recorded live that year at the Oslo Jazz Festival and issued by the Dutch label Challenge. On Parish Stenson plays piano, Fredrik Ljungkvist clarinet and tenor saxophone, Mats Eilertsen double bass, and Strønen drums. The album was recorded in April 2004 at Rainbow Studio in Oslo, with Jan Erik Kongshaug as engineer and Manfred Eicher as producer.
The sixteen pieces mix written themes with three numbered improvisations, from a piano and drums duo to the full quartet, and most of the writing is Strønen's. Ljungkvist's clarinet has an astringent beauty in the four-part Suite for Trio, which opens on his theme and continues in pieces credited to him, Stenson and Strønen. His tenor is bluesier on In Motion, whose 12/8 groove John Kelman of All About Jazz heard as a nod to Keith Jarrett's European quartet of the 1970s. Stenson favours probing single-note lines, Eilertsen's bass recalls Scott LaFaro, and Strønen keeps the counterpoint light and moving.
In Jazzwise, Kenny Mathieson found the music "cool, spare, and thoughtful, with every note carefully placed for maximum weight and effect", abstract but at times lyrical. Writing in Jazzthetik, Guido Diesing observed that the line between free and composed pieces keeps blurring. On repeated listening, he added, more and more motifs emerge from the improvisations that could just as well have been written down. Reinhard Köchl in Jazzthing praised the album's dreamy, half-free contrapuntal improvisations, which he felt gave as much to feeling as to the mind.
CD, ECM 1870, first released on 30 August 2005.
