Karin Krog - In a Rag Bag

WITH A COMBINATION OF CLASSIC SONGS AND NEW MATERIAL IN THE RAGTIME MOOD, KARIN AND MORTEN EVOKE THE SPIRIT OF ONE THE GREAT JAZZ ERAS IN A NEW AND EXCITING WAY. RECORDED LIVE, THIS IS A `MUST HAVE´ FOR ALL JAZZ LOVERS.

When Karin Krog and Morton Gunnar Larsen appeared together in this live concert in Oslo, in March 2012, they brought together a vast wealth of knowledge and experience that is entirely complementary. Karin¹s singing embraces almost every style of jazz and popular song from the days of Irving Berlin to today¹s avant garde. Meanwhile, Morten¹s piano playing is a stylistic compendium of early jazz from ragtime via stride to boogie woogie.
And yet it is true that each of them, in whatever style, retains a totally distinctive musical character, that is immediately identifiable and as individual as a fingerprint or a retinal scan.

Karin is perhaps best known nowadays to an international audience for her frequent collaborations with John Surman, often appearing just as a duo, and incorporating electronics and synthesizers in building up a complete musical landscape together. But as she has also proved in recent visits to London and her renewed collaboration in concert and on record with the doyen of Swedish jazz pianists Bengt Hallberg, her mastery of the Great American songbook is second to none. She brings a wealth of experience and emotional depth to old songs of love won and lost, of absence and reunion, or of hearts broken and mended.
Meanwhile, just as Karin honed her art by working alongside such jazz giants as Dexter Gordon and Archie Shepp, Morten consolidated his precocious teenage talent by seeking out wisdom from one of the pioneers of jazz piano Eubie Blake. Like many of us who witnessed Blake performing in old age ‹ he lived to be a hundred by his own reckoning, quipping that if he¹d known how long he was to live, he¹d have taken better care of himself ‹ Morten heard a man who had witnessed jazz being born, and who had jousted with the players who invented ragtime. And in his own playing Morten somehow captures that miracle of Blake¹s timing that is complete with jazz sensibility, but still has a backward glance over the shoulder at the drawing room rhythms of the 19th century.