Louisa Tuck | Akateeminen Kirjakauppa

The album Who We Are is the first studio recording of the collaboration between pianist Leif Ove Andsnes and saxophonist/composer Marius Neset, two of the world's leading performers in the fields of classical music and jazz, respectively. These two musicians, with backgrounds from different genres, usually focus on different stylistic models in their expressive idioms. For example, like most of his classical colleagues, and unlike jazz performers, Andsnes does not improvise. But despite this difference and others, Who We Are strongly suggests that the similarities in the two players' musical perceptions and approaches are more prevalent and significant than the differences, and that they are pursuing many of the same objectives in their musical narratives. In their encounter here, in Neset's compositions, their playing is imbued with a tangibly inspired, hyper-communicative, fertile sense of community. Playfully, but with total control, of both the stillness and the storm, they create music that sounds entirely organic and original, and which in the course of the album's running time makes words and concepts such as "genres", "genre blends", and "fusion" seem oddly irrelevant.