Various artists - Sky Music: A Tribute to Terje Rypdal

The Guardian 80

(Rune Grammofon)

As a 70th-birthday present for Terje Rypdal, the sound-painterly Norwegian electric guitar original, an all-star international cast of adventurous fellow practitioners – including Americans Bill Frisell and Henry Kaiser, and a raft of Scandinavian players who form thrilling multi-guitar jam-bands on some tracks – have assembled this pulsating tribute to a pioneer who should be a lot better known than he is. Rypdal’s creative path has crossed experimental rock, electronics and classical music as much as jazz, which this powerful project imaginatively acknowledges. Frisell and David Torn contribute delicate solo pieces, with the former making a delightful country-inflected vignette out of the 1985 Rypdal theme, Ornen, while Torn recreates Avskjed (from 1980’s Descendre) as tender electronic glides and bell-chime sounds. But it’s the guitar-packed collective jams such as Over Birkerot, Chaser, and Warning: Electric Guitars – with their soaring violin-like sweeps and nerve-jangling distortions, driven by the basslines of Ingebrigt Håker Flaten and Gard Nilssen’s ingeniously bludgeoning drumming – that make so much of this session such an irresistible blast.