Andre Roligheten: Marbles

Tenor saxophonist André Roligheten is best known outside his native Norway, and wider Scandinavia, as a member of drummer Gard Nilssen's Acoustic Unity and as a composer/arranger in the berserker big band, Gard Nilssen's Supersonic Orchestra. Nilssen returns the favour on Marbles, one of Roligheten's infrequent own-name releases.

The album has grown out of a band Roligheten put together in spring 2021 for the Trondheim Jazz Festival, which had commissioned a new piece from him. The band was called Radio and was a quartet comprising Roligheten, Nilssen, keyboardist Ståle Storløkken and bassist Jon Rune Strøm. The commissioned piece was titled "Transmission," and it was a suite which contained early versions of some of the material on Marbles.

Fast forward to spring 2022 and Roligheten and a revamped Radio were in the studio recording Marbles. Roligheten, Nilssen and Strøm were still in the lineup, but Storløkken was gone, replaced—and here is the crucial bit—by Johan Lindstrom on pedal steel guitar and Mattias Ståhl on vibraphone. Calling out to anyone who only has to hear a bar or two of high-oscillating vibraphone to get a flashback: does that sound trippy or what? It sure does, and then crank it up with Lindström's pedal steel, which is less Jim Reeves than Wavy Gravy on a theremin.

The press release suggests the listener imagines that Sonny Rollins and Egberto Gismonti met on the beach at a yoga retreat in Hawaii and decided to make an album together. Roligheten himself writes that he feels the compositions are marbles adrift in a galaxy far, far away. Some listeners may feel like they are riding on a fairground merry-go-round with a head full of Owsley's finest, hearing windblown snatches of a weird-out palais band in the middle distance. Just go with the flow, whatever it is.

The album as a whole is a bit of a curate's egg. Opening track "Sonny River" is a generic Rollins calypso romp which sets everything up a treat. Booting tenor, mindfucking pedal steel/theremin. Later, another romp, "Twin Bliss," this time with an intermittently Arabic vibe and a straight-up electric guitar, returns to similar territory. But some of the other tracks sound a little tentative, like they are early drafts of not fully formed ideas. One's attention wanders. As it would, with all that acid.