Trygve Seim, Frode Haltli – ‘Our Time’

Trygve Seim plays tenor and soprano saxophone and Frode Haltli button accordion. It’s a rare combination but one these two players have had plenty of time to hone: Our Time is their second ECM outing as a duo after Yeraz (2008) and they’ve been playing together in various formations since 2000. That familiarity shows in how intuitively they respond to each other on an album with a high percentage of free improvisation, four originals, a Ukrainian folk song “Oy Khodyt’ Son, Kolo Vikon” (The Dream Passes by the Windows) and a north Indian devotional song, “Shyama Sundara Madana Mohana”. A Stravinsky composition is quoted on “Improvisation No. 4 / Les Cinqs Doigts No. 5” but only as a coda of less than a minute.

At times Seim and Haltli sound almost like two players of one instrument. Saxophone and accordion are both reed instruments driven by air, and Seim’s and Haltli’s phrases often seem to breathe together. Also, the saxophones’ pitches fit within the upper and lower limits of the accordion, and the feeling of oneness is further abetted by Seim’s soft and breathy delivery, and how the accordion spreads across the stereo panorama with the saxophone somewhere in the middle.

But Seim and Haltli also know how to contrast their voices. Seim is fond of large pitch bends (especially effective on the raga “Shyama Sundara Madana Mohana”) and long phrases that sometimes finish with a thick vibrato, creating a Middle Eastern sound akin to that of a tárogató. It’s very different from the accordion (fixed-pitch and polyphonic), a fact that Haltli often judiciously exploits when dancing impishly around Seim’s sinuous lines. Seim provides further tonal contrasts by switching between soprano and tenor sax. For example, he plays his original composition “Fanfare” as a coda to two of the free improvisations, soprano on the first and tenor the second.

The album was recorded in the Himmelfahrtskirche (“Church of the Ascension”) in Munich, a church with a magnificent organ with 35 registers (2377 pipes) that was built in 1994. The church has often been used to record small and mid-sized ensembles, due to its favourable acoustics and quiet location. But there’s a poetic beauty about this conversational set of duets being played in the shadow of a pipe organ, an instrument that (like the saxophones and accordion) produces sound by blowing air through pipes and over reeds.