This week's CD choice reviewed

Tord Gustavsen Ensemble

Restored, Returned, ECM , *****

Tord Gustavsen’s first release for ECM since Being There (2007) is not the same mixture as before. The piano trio of his first three successful albums for the label has morphed into a quintet, including one of Norway’s best saxophonists, Tore Brunborg, on tenor and soprano, and the distinctive Kristin Asbjørnsen on vocals. Gustavsen and the superb Jarle Vespestad on drums remain from the original trio, with Mats Eilertsen replacing Harald Johnsen on bass, but the quintet keeps the trio’s interactive approach and, as Gustavsen has put it in the past, “serves the music”.

The music, again, has the pared- down simplicity and the pull of opposites that mark Gustavsen’s work – the sense of transience and celebration, joy and sadness, intellect and emotion. This tension gives the gorgeous little pieces here a freshness and depth behind their melodic grace. One way or another, it fills the warm and gentle series of original lullabies scattered throughout the album, but it’s particularly true of the four love poems from WH Auden’s Another Time collection, for which Gustavsen devised quintet or quartet musical settings.

Lay Your Sleeping Head, My Love, Wrapped in a Yielding Air, O Stand, Stand at the Windowand Restored, Returnedare all poems filled with the fragility, sensuality and complexities of the universal emotion they express. And these deceptively sparse musical settings, where the space between the notes is as expressive as the notes themselves, are given sensitive and sensual performances, with Asbjørnsen's ability to inhabit a lyric and deliver it from inside supported by a slightly ravaged, gospel-tinged, frayed-round-the- edges vocal quality.

Asbjørnsen is just one strong, personal colour among others. In a quintet so alert to the demands of the music, it's striking how Gustavsen has drawn on and responded to their personal qualities and blended them into a unified whole. That unity persists even when he breaks up the quintet into smaller units. The duos of The Child Within(for piano and soprano) and Left Over Lullaby No 3(for piano and voice) are as rounded and beautiful as the quartet of tenor and trio The Gaze, or the piano trio exploration of Your Crooked Heart.

And, for all its understated manner, the group can also develop a visceral groove, such as the stately, folk-like funk of The Spiral that prefaces Wrapped in a Yielding Air. www.tordgustavsen. com