Suckers for a big soppy tune? Step this way
Listen to ‘Behind the Clouds’ first up – sentimental enough for gangsters? Yes.
But there’s more to Faces than overly melodic indulgence or social function.
And the album isn’t at all cheesy.
Where’s Erik? Palmberg, born in Stockholm studied at the Royal College of Music there before furthering his education in Berlin.
Don’t let the roses in their garden fade away
His first album First Lines was released in 2018 followed by the more interesting In Between three years later.
Like many trumpeters Palmberg also plays the darker, richer and more generously giving flugelhorn.
His approach and connoisseur flourishes have been shaped by – something inside so strong – the sound in the mind’s eye of Freddie Hubbard, Miles Davis, Tom Harrell and Kenny Wheeler.
On Faces he’s with fellow Swedes pianist Anton Dromberg, bassist Niklas Wennstrom and drummer Sebastian Voelger.
Ingenious arrangement of ‘I Remember You’
There’s an ingenious arrangement of ‘I Remember You’ where Palmberg tonally is at his most Harrell-like and where Wennstrom provides astute underpinning.
We are thinking of Harrell’s soloing on a 1991 Philip Catherine Chet Baker tribute album issued by the Dutch label Criss Cross Jazz and marvelling at how in the Faces arrangement there is a way into the classic that breathes new life into it while also bearing in mind shards of melody and scraps of chord changes doesn’t come out of thin air. In bearing in mind the sound of such an aesthete of a player as Harrell you can learn so much and then find your own sound within that cosmos from such a prodigious springboard of melodic paraphrase.
But with the Catherine release, given the chugging guitar Ginger to hornman Harrell’s Fred interplay, the setting couldn’t be more different in their shadow play swinging treatment of the 1940s Victor Schertzinger tune in how it’s arranged and delivered.
Overall Faces is a bit too easy going in places if it has a fault. And maybe a few tunes are too toothsome. But our starting point the brilliantly elegiac ‘Behind the Clouds’ is a big achievement and also the muted smears and feints draped all over ‘Silver Moon’ is up there as a considerable strong suit of the album.
Reader, gentle listener, wannabe cigar chomping mogul who might even want to put these guys on at your club or festival don’t let the roses in their garden fade away. Get on the blower to Stockholm today.
