Jan Bang - Arve Henriksen: After The Wildfire

Jan Bang is a musician, composer and record producer who was born in August 1968, in Denver, Colorado, but grew up in Kristiansand, Norway. Arve Henriksen is a trumpeter, vocalist and composer who was born in March 1968, in Stranda, Norway. For the 42nd Skopje Jazz Festival in 2023, Bang and Henriksen were commissioned to work together on new music. The result was After the Wildfire. It was first performed at the Festival with Bang on live sampling and electronics, Henriksen on trumpet and voice plus guitarist Eivind Aarset and percussionist Ingar Zach, with the FAMES Institute Orchestra and Macedonian voices, arranged and conducted by Dzijan Emin. That premier revealed music somewhere between genres—ambient, folk and symphonic—with a main feature being innovation and creativity.

The album itself, After The Wildfire (Punkt Editions, 2025), has developed significantly from the festival version while still retaining all its elements. The album has added recordings made at Punkt studio by Aarset, Bang and Henriksen, which include the opener, "Seeing (Eyes Closed)," the side two opener, "Halfway Between Noon and Sunset" and the closer, "Remnants." "Seeing (Eyes Closed)" features Henriksen's ethereal trumpet and gets things off to a warm, engaging start. "Acadia" overflows with mixed emotions, whether they be sorrow, love, loss or warmth. "Meridian Moon" encapsulates the emotions of those who gaze at a night—or day— sky in search of pattern or meaning. "Grassland" is tense and spacious, a silent hunt, a low growling and the textural padding of predatory feet; this is music of vast terrain, in which stillness conceals predators moving stealthily beneath the tall grass.

On side two, "Halfway Between Noon and Sunset" pulses with a near-mechanical inevitability, precise yet haunted, while "Pehlivan Fighters" surges with ecstatic energy, folk heroes of the soul rising before an invisible crowd, ritual contest as communal celebration, rhythm as both muscle and spirit. "Abandoned Cathedral II" is the de-configuring of architecture itself, where present haunts past and past haunts present, each rationalizing with a revisitation of loss. Finally, "Remnants" leaves only a dull sparkle, the shimmer of light on dark water, where the definite dissolves into suggestion. Sparse and brittle, it is the afterimage that lingers, after a fire. Threaded throughout is a meditation on the strength of nature against the impermanence of human endeavor.