I was pleasantly surprised to hear Bugge Wesseltoft playing solo on a grand piano in the stylish arrivals lounge at Oslo airport in 2017. It was the kind of calming welcome one appreciated after having arrived on a plane from London for the Norwegian capital’s international jazz festival. The Nordic trailblazer at the time was launching his new ACT label CD Everybody Loves Angels, playing the music of The Beatles, Paul Simon, Bruno Mars, Bach and the Nordic folk tradition. Following a shift in focus of his work in 2018 until now as a member of the post-EST supertrio RYMDEN, he releases a new solo piano recording Be Am on his influential Jazzland imprint. It’s a tougher test in many ways as he performs without the lifejacket of repertoire that made up Everybody Loves Angels: this is a set entirely made up of in-the-moment improv with no pre-knowledge of compositional structure or melody and rhythm to fall back on. Wesseltoft’s approach is to develop a series of mood pieces rather than tell a story, and his style is meditative and wistful for the most part; tempos are unhurried and the sound of silence is valued as much as the notes played. Along the way the music nods to the post-1970s American acoustic singer-songwriter era, the understated minimalism of Satie rather than Reich through to spirituals, hymns and folky minor-sounding modes, the latter enhanced by the addition of kalimba on a couple of tracks. Having opened for Wesseltoft’s 20-year label anniversary tour back in 2016, the saxophonist Håkon Kornstad makes an impressive cameo on two tracks, a highlight being the song-like ‘Roads’ with his tenor vocalising sensuously, sailing on Wesseltoft’s slightly overdriven yet dreamy Fender Rhodes.