Gefion, named for the Norse goddess associated with ploughing, prophecy and premonition, is the ECM leader debut of Danish guitarist Jakob Bro. Bro first recorded for ECM with Paul Motian on Garden of Eden in 2004, followed by Tomasz Stanko’s Dark Eyes album of 2009. The guitarist’s feeling for melody, sound-colour and atmosphere served him well in those contexts, as it does here in the realization of his own free floating ballads and drifting, spacious-yet-focused pieces. “Lucidity is in the air when guitarist Jakob Bro plays,” the late Danish journalist Ib Skovgaard wrote. “His music transcends genres. It’s beyond categories, a personal music following a track which is consistent with Bro’s constant search for melodic clarity in the songs”. Gefion was recorded at Oslo’s Rainbow Studio in November 2013 and produced by Manfred Eicher. It introduces a group with US bassist Thomas Morgan and Norwegian drummer Jon Christensen, which has been a priority project for Jakob Bro in recent years. Bro views Thomas Morgan as a “soulmate in music”. As Craig Taborn once said of the bassist, nobody is more rigorous about holding onto the compositional fabric of a piece of music and honouring its intentions. In the stripped-to-essentials context of Gefion, the bassist is able to make his well-chosen notes say a great deal; Bro and Morgan thoughtfully explore the music together, buoyed and stimulated by the lapping waves of Jon Christensen’s drums and cymbals. Whether driving or detailing the music, Christensen plainly relishes the freedoms offered by the trio formation.
