The Norwegian trumpeter, composer and producer Nils Petter Molvær has changed the face of improvised music in Europe in the past few decades. Besides leaving a mark as a trumpeter, creating his own unique sound, he has also recorded soundtracks for a number of films, TV-films, documentaries and plays, and has released nine albums under his own name.

His debut album “Khmer” (ECM) sold over 250,000 copies worldwide and established his reputation as one of the leading voices of the new European jazz movement of the Nineties. The follow-up albums “Solid Either”, “NP3”, “Streamer”, “ER”, “Re-Vision”, and “Hamada” were all released successfully by Universal/Emarcy worldwide. Molvær stretches himself out at will in time and space, subjecting himself to the new technology of the moment in order to give ever new expression to his timelessly unbridled romanticism. His music is full of radical tenderness, compact vulnerability and robust fragility. Nils Petter Molvaer is a living contradiction, and that is what makes him so human as an artist. Photo: Anja Elmine Basma

With a quartet in which he himself plays trumpet, electronics and effects, Geir Sundstöl contributes a storehouse of exotic guitars and banjos, Jo Berger Myhre works out on bass, keyboards and more guitars and the former Madrugada drummer Erland Dahlen is responsible as one of Europe’s most versatile sound-painters for drums, percussion, xylophone, piano and any kind of everyday object you can imagine, Molvaer sallies forth on a journey through the horizontal, vertical and temporal. All four musicians back up their formidable arsenal of sound-generators with their personal integrity and with an incredible wealth of experience that each has collected independently of the others.

The new album Buoyancy is a band album. More than ever, Molvaer has involved his fellow-music-makers in the concept. Switch brought him closer to Sundstöl and Dahlen, while new boy Jo Berger Myhre had considerable influence on the form the album would take, not least as Molvaer’s co-producer. The fact that it is a band venture doesn’t mean that Molvaer could deny himself a few highly poetic solo passages along the way. But in a wonderful way he succeeds in folding the whole band sound into his trumpet, so even the solo passages come across as collective achievements.