Kassandra brings together two exceptional musicians. Oslo-based, South Africa-born multidisciplinary artist and vocalist Juliana Venter and alto sax player Rolf-Erik Nystrøm in a set of eight intimate, imaginative songs. Venter was known as the Queen of Avant-Garde in South Africa, from Paal Nilssen-Love Circus, as well as for her stand against apartheid and the genocide of the Palestinian people in Gaza. Kassandra explores her full potential as a vocal artist who feels at home with notated and free-improvised music, operatic and extended vocal techniques, contemporary music, jazz, and folk music expressions. She is about to release two more albums later this year, leading a quartet and a solo album.
Nystrøm, like Venter, is a genre-defying musician, known for his work with the trio POING, an associate professor of contemporary music at the Norwegian Academy of Music, as well as for his extraordinary control and technique.
Venter and Nystrøm have been working on developing the duo concept with saxophone and vocals for almost ten years. They ask us to «imagine the most private moment, a woman, sitting alone outside in the sun in South Africa, daydreaming by herself, humming a melody from her heart as the soft wind blows the dry dust slightly in small circles along the ground». Nystrøm’s alto sax ornaments Venter’s dreamy melodies. The album’s cover artwork reflects such an intimate, sensual dream and is an original painting by Wayne Barker, one of South Africa’s foremost artists.
Kassandra offers the rich, inclusive, and deeply personal musical world of Venter and Nystrøm. The thoughtful but surprising sequence of the songs captures the many inspirations of the duo, ranging from nature and birds to Africa, ancient Greek legends, and musical ideas borrowed from Iannis Xenakis, Erik Satie, and Anton Webern. The album begins with an adaptation of a poem by South African poet and artist Wopko Jensma, «Gromringervarasies», sung in Afrikaans by Venter, who also explores her commanding vocal artistry, and it is beautifully accompanied by the ever-inventive Nystrøm. The following jazz standard, «Without Your Love», was identified with Billie Holiday and receives a touching, vulnerable version. And then the duo recomposes the French Baroque, chamber «Consert De Différents Oyseaux» by seventeenth-century composer Étienne Moulinié, adding their own playful vocal and sax bird calls..
The title piece, composed by Venter and Nystrøm, is named after the Greek legend of the Trojan princess who was granted the gift of foresight by the lovestruck Apollo, but who, after rejecting his advances, was cursed never to be believed. This song finds the duo in its most free, explorative, and adventurous form, corresponding with Dada and ancient ritualist, Chinese, and Japanese music, and eventually exploding in a powerful coda, with Nilssen-Love on the drums. «Gloomy Sunday», known as the «Hungarian Suicide Song», sung by Paul Robeson and Billie Holiday, originally lamenting the loss of a dear love, but Venter and Nystrøm’s version sounds like an urgent lament of the mass losses of current futile wars.
«Qongqothwane/ The Click Song», a traditional song of the Xhosa people of South Africa, with words by South African singer Miriam Makeba, allows Venter to demonstrate her extended vocal techniques of the Xhosa tradition, meeting Norwegian folk music with the Hardanger fiddle of Nils Økland. «Ah Johanna», based on a poem of Austrian expressionist poet Georg Trakl and music by South African double bass player Brydon Bolton and Venter, and sung in German, explores gently a haunting, melancholic drama, intensified with the deep and dark-toned bowed double bass work of Mats Eilertsen. This most touching, one-of-a-kind album ends with producer and electronics player Rolf Wellin’s remix of the duo’s achingly beautiful interpretation of Pyotr Tchaikovsky’s meditative «Hymn of the Cherubim» (of the choral Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom, Op. 41, 1878).
Eyal Hareuveni
Juliana Venter (vocals), Rolf-Erik Nystrøm (alto saxophone), Paal Nilssen-Love (gongs, drums), Nils Økland (violin, hardanger fiddle), Mats Eilertsen (double bass), Rolf Wallin (electronics)
