Cæcilie Norby: First Conversation

While CAECILIE wrote all the songs and lyrics on "Queen Of Bad Excuses" herself, only two songs on the new album were penned by her, "Leaving Town For The Weekend" and "First Conversation". However, both tracks are particularly personal and no great decoding skills are required to understand the title track as a spiritual "First Conversation" between a mother and her expectant child: "If you could speak would you describe where you've been/ The world you came from/ Do the babies fall from stars above or are they chemical results of love/ Were you meant for me as I was meant for you." The listener is treated to a multitude of grandiose interpretations, the likes of which can only be achieved with such cool elegance and yet highly emotional intensity by the exceptional Danish disuse. Standards such as "Midnight Sun" or "You Must Believe In Spring" can be found alongside pop interpretations that NORBY has always loved, this time Glenn Campell's "Gentle On My Mind", Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah" and "Tea In The Sahara" by Police. First Conversation" was recorded last year in the Rainbow Studio in Oslo; the studio enjoys legendary status among connoisseurs because it gave many recordings by Scandinavian artists for the ECM label that typically crystalline Nordic flair. In addition to NORBY, Dahl (piano) and Danielsson (bass, cello, organ, Fender Rhodes), the top-class studio team included trumpeter Per Jorgensen and drummer Jon Christensen (Keith Jarrett, Bud Powell, Ben Webster, Jan Gabarek), both from Norway. CAECILIE NORBY has thus succeeded in creating an album that homogeneously combines the concentrated atmosphere of Scandinavian jazz recordings with the nightclub feeling of US jazz. At the same time, "First Conversation" is an album whose sensitivity stems in large part from the artist's role as a mother.