Written in air
Jan Bang is one of the people responsible for the great wave of creative music from Norway over the past three decades. As a producer and player, he’s collaborated with Dhafer Youssef, Nils Petter Molvaer, Arve Henriksen, David Sylvian, Bugge Wesseltoft and many others. In the fishing port of Kristiansand, where he was born in 1968, he and his friend Erik Honoré founded the annual Punkt Festival, where since 2005 live performances have been subjected to immediate remixes. (I wrote about a visit to the 2019 edition here.)
His new album, Reading the Air, is a sequence of songs with music mostly by himself and lyrics by Honoré. The musicians include Henriksen on trumpet, the singers Simin Tander and Benedikte Kløwe Askedalen, the guitarist Eivind Aarset, the bassist Audun Erlien, the drummer Anders Engen and the percussionist Adam Rudolph.
What does it sound like? I was put in mind of late Blue Nile filtered through Jon Hassell’s Fourth World recordings: fragile-sounding melodies, introspective lyrics, voices singing from some private sphere, gauzy textures shaped and layered with great care, on the edge of decay. Through the 10 tracks, there’s a consistency of mood, elegant and reflective.
Here are the opening lines of Honoré’s lyric for the exquisitely beautiful title song: Moving on /We’re planning our escape / Preparing to leave / The disconnected state / Bridges burned / The tables turned / Reading the air / To reconnect with fate. A piano is played in an empty ballroom. A swaying groove emerges and simmers quietly. Bang’s ruminative vocal is sometimes doubled by a female singing over his shoulder. What sounds like a section of shakuhachis turns out to be overdubbed trumpets played by Henriksen, who steps forward for a lighter-than-air solo. I could easily imagine successful covers of this by Annie Lennox, Bryan Ferry or Beth Gibbons with Rustin Man.
The other track I want to mention is the only non-original composition, a version of the old folk-blues song called “Delia” or “Delia’s Gone”, which exists in many versions. This is not the murder-ballad variant recorded by Bob Dylan on World Gone Wrong in 1993 (credited as “traditional”) or the bloodier iteration that Johnny Cash included on the first volume of his American Recordings in 1994 (credited to Cash, Karl Silbersdorf and Dick Toops). Curiously, it’s the smoother and more lyrical variation that Harry Belafonte sang in 1954 on his debut album, “Mark Twain” and Other Folk Favourites, credited to Lester Judson and Fred Brooks. Judson was a commercial songwriter. Brooks was a temporary nom de plume for Fred Hellerman, a member (with Pete Seeger) of the Weavers, who were then under investigation by the FBI for alleged Communist sympathies.
Bang’s version is a sort of Nordic Americana: the bell of a wooden church in the snow, muffled drums, the refined twang of Arset’s lightly picked guitar. No murders in the lyric, but three-part vocal harmony like a bluegrass family stranded up a fjord, in danger of death from exposure to the cruel elements. The line about “everything I had is gone” can rarely have sounded so final.
* Jan Bang’s Reading the Air is released on 19 January on the Punkt Editions label. The photo of Bang is by Alf Solbakken. You can hear “Delia” on this link: https://janbang.bandcamp.com/album/reading-the-air
thebluemoment.com 
There’s a hard frost outside as a pristine day slowly gathers the dusk. Reading this wonderfully lyrical description transports me into that fjord to hold hands with the elements. Thanks Richard
This sounds right up my street – Blue Nile meets Jon Hassell. Also nice to see a mention of Harry Belafonte – it should not be forgotten that he recorded the first version (I think) of ‘Come Away Melinda’ best known, to most folk of a certain age, through the version by Tim Rose as featured on the first CBS ‘Rock Machine’ comp which cost, from memory, 15/6d in old money. I would also mention the Uriah Heep version just because I doubt that they’ve ever been mentioned on this blog – nor ever again…
When I think about early encounters with Richard Williams‘ writings in the Melody Maker, this memory returns every once in a while: he once wrote that review called „Modern Mood Music“ in regards to Jan Garbarek‘s „Places“, Brian Eno‘s „Music For Films“ and Weather Report‘s „Mr. Gone“. Well, at least the first two of these albums can be seen as classics today, and Jan Bang‘s song album „Reading The Air“ could easily join that club of „modern mood music“ – it is such a beautifully textured collection of songs, with surely more blue than red moments. Anyone new to Mr. Bang, and with a weak spot for Julee Cruise, The Blue Nile, Mr. Sylvian and that record titled „Last Night The Moon The Moon Came Dropping Its Clothes In The Street“, should be prepared for a discovery!