When pianist Carsten Dahl went into the studio with his perennial fellow musicians, the bassist Niels Bo Davidsen and the drummer Stefan Pasborg, it was...

When pianist Carsten Dahl went into the studio with his perennial fellow musicians, the bassist Niels Bo Davidsen and the drummer Stefan Pasborg, it was with a special dogma: Not to say a word throughout the recording. The album was created in a continuous sequence of first takes and everything was improvised without previous agreements or ideas except ’Falling Down’ and ’How I Hear Beauty’ based on some chords Dahl scratched down on a piece of paper in the studio. There is a natural, fluent and electric feeling in the music. The trio creates a series of intense pieces most of them no longer than 3-4 minutes, but together they constitute a suite-like process with stimulating variation in form and expression. ‘To me Mirrors Within is the picture of the collective and the universal’, Dahl says. ‘In the music we mirror ourselves in one another. But the mirror can also break and behind it is black’. Hereby he insinuate the both bright and dark sides of his own artist life. He has spoken in public about trauma, therapy and medicine. Music, painting and poetry are his creative responses. Mirrors Within points in the direction of the inner landscapes of music, those places in the mind where music can become ‘sound that bleeds, infect and flourish’, as written in the Brøndums Encyklopædi. Dahl, Davidsen & Pasborg have developed a special musical dialect together. We are way beyond instrumental skills, which are top class, but it is about much more than that. The best way perhaps to summarize the activities is with the word: empathy. Not as a feeling, but as an ability to participate in a mutual human action which otherwise could not be realized.

REVIEW:

Pianist Carsten Dahl joins together with bassist Bo Davidsen and drummer Stean Pasborg for an intriguing idea of putting together a series of first takes without any discussion or preparation. In this case, these gents turn the event into a rich collection of concise melodic moments.

The team gets a bit frisky on pieces like the frenetic “How I Hear Beautiful” and the Monkish bopper “Palilalia” and they show some quirky moments as Pasborg delivers some nifty brush work on a Spherical take of “Everything Happens to Me”. Dahl’s touch is rich on the pretty “Falling Down Down” and classy on “The Prayer.” Davidson supplies a big sound for “Coma” and the team swings hard on the hip “Turning Left”.  Impressive impressions.

-- Jazz Weekly (George W, Harris)