In medieval times, mapmakers had to deal with the unknown. The phrase “Hic sunt leones” (“Here be lions”), often accompanied by a fanciful portrait of a big cat, signaled the point where known civilization ended and the unknown began. It’s a curious name for a record by a jazz piano trio that’s existed with the same personnel for 20 years. The threesome is led by Håvard Wiik, a pianist who has flexed a prodigious command of both composed and improvised music-making since 1992, when he first played a major jazz festival in his native Norway at the age of 17. What is this unknown of which he speaks?
“Pentimento,” the album’s lead track and advance single, also gives the first clue to decoding its title. Its opening sequence projects such romantic grace that you might miss its convolution; Håkon Mjåset Johansen’s drums swell buoyantly underneath the lush harmony articulated by Ole Morten Vågen’s spare, swinging double bass and Wiik’s rich yet not-too-sweet chords. But within a minute, the atmosphere darkens as the bass induces an undertow and the drums stealthily up the tension. The trio threatens a maelstrom, only to retreat and return to the opening material. In just a little more than four minutes, they’ve quietly pulled the rug out from under you and then put it back.
Next up is “Uncharted I,” the first of five brief, numbered piano solos. Wiik’s bright, tumbling notes seem to rain at first, only to slow and tug to the side like a navigator pulling over to check a map that seems to contradict what he sees. On “A Parliament Of Owls,” the trio bends idiomatic sounds into unpredictable shapes; on “Radar KL,” the terrain keeps changing. Solo passages resolve so elegantly that they seem like essential parts of a tune’s structure, and yet they impart a jolt of uncertainty that’ll have you leaning in while grabbing your armrest just a little too hard.
If Wiik expressed this music as a medieval map, the lions wouldn’t be at its edges, but deep in the interior. The more you investigate, the deeper you go and the less you know. Surrender to the search. [Sonic Transmissions]
—Bill Meyer
