Simon Toldam - Tak for dit brev (2021)

The songs on Tak for dit brev (Thank You For Your Letter), the new album from Danish pianist and composer Simon Toldam, are a series of musical letters inspired by personal transformative events and a tribute to the daily shared experience of being unavoidably affected by both the positive and disheartening things around us.

On Tak for dit brev, Toldam explores a melodically-motivated sonic landscape, marking a departure from his more recent chord-centric work. He wrote most of the songs on clarinet, which applied new parameters and added new character to the process. Writing on a single-voice instrument (limited to playing one note at a time) demands and offers a different compositional approach than
a multi-voiced instrument like piano does.

This opened up new structural doors to Toldam, compelling him to create the melodic material first, thereafter creating the harmonic context and arrangement around it. His marvelous ability to absorb and create music from surprising and fascinating angles is on full display here as he presents songs which orbit around strong melodies and shine with unabashed influence from Scandinavian Folk and Jazz musical traditions.

For the recording session at Stockholm’s Atlantic Studio in June of 2019, Toldam invited legendary Swedish bassist and composer, Georg Riedel (born 1934). Among other things, Riedel is known for his celebrated collaborations with Swedish pianist Jan Johansson (appearing on the timeless masterpiece, JAZZ PÅ SVENSKA), as well as having scored several Astrid Lindgren films, including Pippi Longstocking, Emil of Maple Hills, and many more. The rest of the band includes some of the most original voices and instrumental story-tellers in Scandinavia – Nils Berg on bass clarinet, Tobias Wiklund on cornet, and Anders Christensen on bass.

Tak for dit brev is Toldam’s 15th album as leader and co-leader. He is a recipient of
the prestigious 3-year Working Grant from the Danish Arts Council, and a winner of5 Danish Jazz Grammys (Danish Music Awards), most recently “Jazz Album of the Year” in 2019 for his trio recording, OMHU.