The new trio of Danish-born, Paris-based guitarist Hasser Poulsen features like-minded, open-minded, versatile and bold musicians – Danish, Copenhagen-based tenor sax player Fredrik Lundin, who has been adventuring with Poulsen in various styles and bands for three decades, including the trio Sounds of Play, and Polish-born, Malmö-based trumpeter Tomasz Dąbrowski, who studied in Denmark and recorded before with Lundin. Dąbrowski replaced the original trumpeter of the trio, Danish Thomas Fryland.
Poulsen composed 14 short compositions for this trio and the trio recorded them at BMC Studio in Budapest last summer. Poulsen, known for his trios Das Kapital and Kaleidoscope as well as his Tom Waits tribute project, Tom’s Wild Years, swears by simplicity and his compositions demand spontaneous and individual interpretation and improvisation. The skeletal, melodic and emotive compositional outlines are meant to liberate the imagination, offer new directions, and allow the three musicians to play and twist Poulsen’s ideas.
The dynamics of this trio are most of the time intimate, gentle and often lyrical, relying on the extensive experience of these distinctive musicians, their idiosyncratic voices and their far-reaching musical imagination. Poulsen’s eccentric humor is introduced already in the opening, playful and swinging piece, «Drum Solo», introduced by a beautiful duet of Lundin and Dąbrowski, and obviously with no drums at all. This piece is followed by the moving ballad «Counting Stars» and later on the beautiful hymn-like «Shadow, My Sweet Nurse», «Let the Bells Ring» and «Holy Room», or the folky «Complaint from Southern Sweden», where the three voices caress each other. But the trio’s dynamics sometimes become more free and tense, even rebellious, and reaching contemporary atonal contrasts in «Wasp and Butterfly» or pushing the timbral differences in «Natives». Great trio. Great album.
Poulsen released at the end of 2023 the song «Some Children, Some Women, Some Men», an angry, immediate song in response to the horrible war in the Gaza Strip, the indiscriminate deaths of thousands of innocent Palestinians and the starvation of the surviving of the remaining population there, demanding not only our attention but also decisive action. His compassionate voice is presented in another way.
Eyal Hareuveni
Hasse Poulsen (guitar, arco mando-guitar, vocals), Fredrik Lundin (tenor saxophone), Tomasz Dąbrowski (trumpet)
