The Storm

The keyboardist Bernt Moen is a very versatile musician who has featured on several releases on Losen Records, often in funk and fusion roles and can also be heard as a keyboardist for jazz-rock power quartet Red Kite on Rare Noise. With the 'The Storm', Bernt Moen is back on the grand piano in both trio and solo piano settings. Recogised as one of Norway's most extraodinary musicains and composers, this album is his most personal release to date, giving us a real sense of his incrdible musicianship and personal direction in the world of paino trios.

"In the score to Ludwig van Beethoven's Piano Sonata No. 14 (from 1801) there is written "Sonata quasi una fantasia." I started thinking about that phrase upon listening to Bernt Moen Trio's The Storm. My association was not to the fact that the popular name of Beethoven's sonata is the Moonlight Sonata, although references to nature or natural phenomena seem to be in common. But it was the "quasi una fantasia" that struck me - like a fantasy. As almost a musical genre, the fantasia is a musical composition rooted in improvisation, a free play with musical material, and listening to Bernt Moen's piano on this album may seem like an echo or a continuation of the fantasia in the European tradition of compositional music. Composition and improvisation as two sides of the same coin, as continuations of each other. The different characters of the pieces, the combination of trio and solo piano, makes The Storm an album to be heard as a whole. Three musicians fantasizing in sound." ERIK STEINSKOG

Personnel: Bernt Moen (piano), Fredrik Sahlander (bass), Jan Inge Nilsen (drums).