This year’s Maijazz Festival opening concert promises to be truly memorable. Singer Rebekka Bakken has recently released what is being hailed as possibly her best and most personal album – NORD. Tor Hammerø, music critic in Nettavisen and distinguished jazz connoisseur, gave it a perfect score.
Through her album NORD, Rebekka Bakken turns her gaze – and compass – northwards, both musically and existentially. The album is a journey into her personal roots and beyond, towards something universal. Sung mainly in Norwegian, “because it is my core, my language, my air”, and incorporating touches of English and Arabic, she weaves traditional folk melodies and new compositions into an organic, timeless and spiritual expression.
The songs have followed her since childhood – prayers, lamentations and lullabies which she associates with her mother’s voice and the sound of the church hall. Now she is giving them a new lease of life: “NORD is not an archive,” she stresses, “it’s a heartbeat. It’s my way of turning tradition into a living pulse. A way of making old music resonate once more.”
The album was recorded in four days at Kongshavn Studio alongside a stellar team of musicians: Rune Arnesen, Stein Austrud (also producer), Eivind Aarset and Svein Schultz, as well as guests Hildegunn Øiseth, Saleh Mahfoud and Simon Issát Marainen. In particular, “My Choicest Hours”, featuring lyrics by the Sufi poet Rabia al-Basri and a duet with Mahfoud, opens the album up to a larger, international landscape.
Thematically, NORD revolves around longing, love, doubt and hope – the universal human. The music bears elements of both Norwegian folk music and a blues-inspired depth: “suffering that insists on becoming beauty”, as Bakken says.
“Every note, every breath, my entire being is in this album,” says Rebekka Bakken. “I really felt that I had to give everything I have, and not hold anything back,” she says, having lived with these songs since childhood. “I carried them with me without reflecting over them,” she says. “I didn’t appreciate them at the time. But later in life, they began to return, full of their own intensity, and begging to be expressed. It took years before I felt ready to release them the way I really heard them.”
The result is extraordinarily beautiful. Jazz critic Hammerø writes, inter alia, that “she appears with a strength, credibility and personality which to my ears lifts her up into an elite stratosphere wherever you search for Tellus. Rebekka Bakken deserves all the attention she can get. She is and has one of the most beautiful voices that surround us.”
Photo: Andreas Ausland
Time and place:
Tuesday 5 May, Stavanger Concert Hall – Zetlitz at 19:00 hrs.