Espen Eriksen Trio with Andy Sheppard: As Good As It Gets

Norway's Espen Eriksen Trio is the first Scandinavian piano trio to enjoy a measure of sustained international success since Sweden's Esbjorn Svensson's high-profile run was cut short by Svensson's death in 2008. While some listeners thought that EST's style was becoming over-codifed during its final years, EET still sounds box fresh thirteen years and many thousands of road miles since its debut album, You Had Me At Goodbye (Rune Grammofon, 2010).

What is also remarkable is that EET has been able to retain its distinctive identity while simultaneously shaking it out with the British guest tenor saxophonist Andy Sheppard. Sheppard was first featured on the studio album Perfectly Unhappy (Rune Grammafon, 2018), and then on the live set In The Mountains (Rune Grammafon, 2022).

Sheppard has said that "I knew from the first time I heard the trio play that I would fit right in. I loved the melodic sense and vibe and was thrilled when I was invited to guest in London with the trio." EET chose their saxophonist wisely. Sheppard is one of the most remarkable saxophonists to emerge in Britain since the late 1980s, and the advent of younger artists such as Shabaka Hutchings, Nubya Garcia and Binker Golding has done nothing to diminish his lustre.

Indeed, Sheppard is held in some reverence by the younger players. In a 2021 interview with AAJ, for instance, Hutchings named Sheppard's Romaria (ECM, 2018) as one of six albums which had left a particularly deep impression on him, one which he had gone back to many times and continued to learn from. "I even wrote Andy a message, saying thank you so much, I listen to the album every day," said Hutchings. "It links with the tradition that comes from John Surman and some of the early works of Jan Garbarek in the way there is a poetic quality to the statements that are made on the saxophone. When I first heard it I remember thinking, how do I make my music sound more poetic, like Andy does?" (Hutchings' interview can read in full here.)

As the title suggests, As Good As It Gets has a subtly different atmosphere than Perfectly Unhappy. The melancholia scale is few degrees lower, the temperature a few higher, and the sun is shining a little bit brighter. Not that EET have ever been gloom merchants but... Nordic is as Nordic does. There is only one, minor disappointment: "Pressure," the most intense and dramatic track, fades out rather than coming to a hard stop; it is a bit of an anticlimax. The tension is bled instead by the following, loosely swinging "The American." Maybe that was the group's conscious intention. Whatever. It really does not matter. As Good As It Gets is, near as damn it, precisely that.