Paal Nilssen-Love Circus
Pairs Of Three
NORWAY PNL RECORDS PNL035 CD (2022)
He’s a great musician and probably a larger-than-life person who would slap you heartily on the back until you buy him a beer, but I’m personally getting fed up with Nilssen-Love’s highly extroverted approach to free jazz. It’s manifested here in the upbeat and loud lively music for a party where you don’t really want to be, and the brightly-coloured cover, and inside there’s the colour photo of the fun-loving Norwegians posing and laughing as they invite us to share their adventurous musical trek. This is PNL’s new band project and it mostly derives from his love for Brazilian music – not unrelated to the New Brazilian Funk record from about five years ago. There’s also the talented Oslo singer Juliana Venter adding vocal elements, plus the energetic team of Kalle Moberg, Christian Meaas Svendsen, Oddrun Lilja and others.
It’s evident that PNL is very knowledgable about Brazilian music and its many regional variations, and the musicians here are more than capable on delivering on the tasks they have been set, but I feel (as with many of this musician’s projects) that it’s being over-inflated, overstated, and most of its subtleties removed in favour of “let’s all have a good time”. I seem to be saying it’s all on the surface, but then again that’s hard to square with the complexities and depths we can hear in operation here, even during the short moments I managed to endure. Living out the mood of enforced bonhomie, he has indeed arrived at a new form of “circus jazz”, with its joyous colourful éclats announcing the arrival of popular and lively entertainment in your town. Not every track is full-on; there’s some breathing space in ‘Hummingbird’ and ‘Round About Lapa’, both cuts which also give Venter a charge to spread her vocal wings and make her profound utterances about the secret of life, in between accomplished and daring high-pitched acrobatics that are hard to believe. None for me thanks, but I’m sure many listeners will enjoy it. (28/11/2022)