Older and wiser, Helge Lien returns with a new trio doing what he does best, working with bass and drums on material perfectly suited to his style. He has matured from the exuberant young piano master with Silje Nergaard, to whom anything seemed possible, to a rounded musician of poetic mien and masterful melodic invention.

These tracks from 2020 combine four recorded in Tøyen Church, Oslo and five at the Anjazz Festival. Each track fits well into a narrative arc that gives broader context of the album and lends greater meaning to individual compositions within it. It creates an engaging symmetry that harks back to the “album experience” of long playing recordings, where the music was ordered in a way that made stopping the best albums halfway through was akin to someone boorishly switching channels in the middle of an engrossing movie on TV. Lien has always been an accomplished pianist, but here he suggests he can be something more, a name that can be mentioned alongside the likes of Jan Johannsen, Bengt Hallberg, Bobo Stenson and Esbjorn Svensson in the pantheon of important Nordic pianists.