Grete Skarpeid - Beyond Other Stories (2021)

Norwegian vocalist/composer Grete Skarpeid's "Beyond Other Stories" is contemporary word painting at its finest, with rhythmic contours beautifully enhanced by a quartet of master musicians, led by Cuban pianist Aruán Ortiz. Skarpeid draws us into the interior landscape of life with an eerily beautiful sense of freedom in her voice, mixing melancholy and joy, vulnerability and splendor. Ortiz's beautifully crafted arrangements of variety and sensuousness, are captured in every caressed phrase by Skarpeid. The music shines from the ethereal magnificence of "Singing Again," which sets to music a poem by the noted Norwegian poet Olav H. Hauge, through the feelings of spiritual loss evoked in "Adam and Eve," to the existential weightlessness of "Flying High." The unlikely musical partnership of Grete and Aruán began by happenstance when Ortiz passed through Grete's remote hometown while touring Norway with Don Byron. Grete shared some of her original songs with Ortiz, who instantly fell in love with her music and encouraged her to write more, later collaborating in New York on Skarpeid's first album, "My Songs" in 2016.