Pasado en claro brings together the Swedish bassist Anders Jormin, the singer and fiddler Lena Willemark and the koto player Karin Nakagawa. For this album they are joined by the drummer Jon Fält. Jormin and Willemark first recorded together for ECM on In Winds, In Light in 2004, and Nakagawa joined them on Trees of Light in 2015. The new album sets poems from ancient China and Japan, Renaissance Italy, Mexico and Sweden, alongside four songs by Willemark herself. The result moves between Nordic folk, jazz and free improvisation.
Jormin plays double bass and wrote the music for seven of the eleven pieces. Willemark sings and plays violin and viola, Nakagawa plays a 25-string koto, and Fält, Jormin's long-time partner in the Bobo Stenson Trio, plays drums and percussion. The quartet recorded at Studio Epidemin in Gothenburg in late 2021, with Johannes Lundberg as engineer and co-producer and Manfred Eicher as executive producer. Jormin's texts come from Ouyang Xiu, Yamabe no Akahito, Tomas Tranströmer, Jörgen Lind, Anna Greta Wide, Octavio Paz and Petrarch. "Something stronger than our four individual voices may awake," Jormin writes of the way the four musicians listen to each other.
The opening Mist of the River, on a poem by Ouyang Xiu, lasts seven minutes and shows how wide a range of sound the koto can offer. Willemark's own The Woman of the Long Ice works with dramatic effects and sinuous melody, and her Ramona Elena makes room for a koto solo. Glowworm, on a poem by Yamabe no Akahito, puts voice and bass in close partnership, with Nakagawa and Fält in gentle support. Willemark keeps her violin in the background and lets the singing carry the songs.
In The Guardian, John Fordham heard "softly impassioned vocals amid abstract soundworlds, gently prancing dances, and whispered singing entwined with bass-improv counterpoint". Michael Toland of Big Takeover admitted the comparison was only vaguely accurate, then described the album as "a Swedish Pentangle". Not everyone was won over: in Songlines, Simon Broughton admired the instrumental passages but found the 58 minutes too long to hold his interest.
This is the CD edition, ECM 2761, released on 20 January 2023.
