By Don Phipps

Approximating the intimacy of Paul Bley’s traditional Open to Love, Contact of
Time, an album crafted by Norwegian Arve Henriksen (trumpet and
electronics) and Dutch Harmen Fraanje (piano), gives up contemplative and
pensive music that gives an internal peace for our deeply troubling time.
Henriksen’s floating trumpet traces have a luminescent, shimmering high quality.
They float alongside the ethereal contours of Fraanje’s piano traces, whereas Fraanje
at occasions performs Chopinesque splashes that add coloration and context to the
mild phrases.

The album opens with “Melancholia,” the place the music offers off a way of
foreboding – a view of a chilly unforgiving ocean on a grey misty day. There
is the darkish disappointment implied by the drawling traces of “Redream” – like
driving by considered one of many deserted boarded up downtowns that dot the
Nice Plains and questioning how or why – and the virtually pleading and craving
in the event of “The Darkish Mild.” And too, like an ocean earlier than a
storm, “Mirror Photos” makes use of darkish piano chords and sustained trumpet notes
to create an unsettling magnificence.

Not all the poetry on this album is tinged with sorrow. Take the
intimate candlelight implied by “The Great thing about Sundays” or the pastoral
orange purple sundown prompt by “What All This Is.” On “Contact of Time,”
Henriksen’s flute-like trumpet sounds linger over Fraanje’s
Debussy-inspired traces, as if one is gazing from rock ledges out to an unlimited
sea under.

Fraanje generally performs contained in the piano, placing the strings to create
crevice-like results. At different occasions, he whispers together with his pedaled
pianissimo. On “Purple and Black, he makes use of summary left-hand Messiaen-like
phrasing whereas his proper hand explores the keyboard with a collection of sunshine
pedaled splashes.

Is that this music about lonely strolls down deserted windswept streets? Is it
about laying beneath stars and wanting up on the vastness of area? Or
is it mild introspection, the reward of two artists and their
collaboration? It’s as much as you to seek out out.