Geir Lysne - New Circle (2013)

Around 15 years ago, a new generation of jazzers set out to find new ways of escaping the rigidity of post-bop and jazz fusion. Young musicians, especially in Scandinavia, tore down genre borders and borrowed from their own folk music, rock and pop. Geir Lysne's redefinition of the big band concept was and is hardly any less revolutionary. Lysne taught the jazz orchestra an entirely new richness of timbres on three ACT albums. With unaccustomed instrumentations using flutes, percussion, laptop and instrumentally employed voices, and most of all with extensive recourse to world music contexts, a new 'Nordic' and unmistakable kind of melodious stereophony and dynamism resulted for the big ensemble.