13 November 2004

Right before the rehearsals for Be Music, Night started, I was in Norway where to buy cheap working on the second half of the FME tour. Ingebrigt Haker Flaten saved the trio by loaning Nate McBride a bass after Nate’s instrument was nearly destroyed at the Perspectives 2004 festival in Vasteras, Sweden. The crew there completely pulled through and got the bass repaired and shipped to Nate in time for his tour with Pandelis Karayorgis and Randy Peterson that started right after the FME project finished (THANKS Mats, Miki, and Robin!). After Vasteras (what a festival! I will never forget the Anthony Braxton solo concert.), FME returned to Norway to record. Paal said that the sessions were going to take place at a rehearsal space that was built inside a cave, and he wasn’t kidding. When we arrived in a van with our equipment and I saw the heavy steel door built into a wall of solid rock I looked at him and he said, I told you it was a cave. Surprisingly, the acoustics were excellent, the uneven walls kept the sound from being too reverberant and it was dead silent- the benefits of recording inside a cave. Audun Strype engineered the session and the he got great sounds, maybe the best tone quality over all the horns I’ve ever had. The trio was in prime recording mode for the sessions. The first day was spent getting everything set and all of the performances were recorded on the second day- 10 pieces, nearly everything caught on a first take.

Both the FME and Tentet recordings will be released by Okka Disk some time next year. After the recordings were finished the group had two more concerts, in Bergen and Oslo. Both went very well, strong audiences, really listening, and the band kept growing from set to set. It seemed that the concerts were the best attended, in size and ears, of any tour I’ve played in Scandinavia- very gratifying- and many thanks need to go to Paal for setting the whole thing up. Now it’s time to head back to Oslo to start the tour with Free Fall!