By Brian Earley
The whimsical asides and tumbling surprises of Karl Bjora and his trio on
The Essence, his latest 2025 release for Sonic Transmissions Records,
delightfully plays with listener expectations. A tune, for example, that
opens with an acoustic bass solo may soon become more video game soundtrack
than jazz guitar trio. An established moderate tempo may pivot laughably
to Keystone Cops by song’s end. Ticklingly silly plucked guitar strings open
swiftly to a soundscape as wide as the dawn.
Without knowing Bjora’s discography, then, what would come as the craziest
surprise of all is his deep connection to composition. However, the
guitarist has built a career, albeit short (he was born in 1991), working in
ensembles using compositions that are so much fun to listen to they hardly
feel complex at root, though painstakingly complicated they are. Just
listen, for example, to Signe Emmeluth’s Spacemusic Ensemble, or to his own
rich compositions on 2021’s Whimsical Giant.
For this date, Bjora has assembled fellow Norwegian Ole Mofjell on drums and
Norway born and Texas transplant polymath Ingebrigt Haker Flaten as the man
with the bass. The trio works, or rather plays, seamlessly, as though
successful navigation through these snaking songs were inevitable. Joy
glows immediately from the album’s opener, “Consider Yourself Encouraged.”
After laughing at the dry irony of the song’s title, one hears Bjora and
company cruising swiftly out of the gate. “FOMO” is Wes Montgomery laughing
in a child’s toy sailboat as it bounces on ripples and tumbles over
waterfalls until the composition opens to broad and deep waters of a
soundscape so beautiful I almost cried listening to it for the first time.
If there is a storm in “Maelstrom,” the date’s third piece, it is the
electronic surprises the song has in store for its listeners. The trinkling
of “Smokes” leads to the album’s closer and title track, “The Essence,”
which encounters listeners with layered polyrhythms as it fights its way
upstream to the silence that remains as the collection ends and the listener
stands on shore again now encouraged to play with sandcastles and children’s
toy buckets rather than contemplate the meaning of life at sunset.
None of this is to say this isn’t serious music. It is powerful and deeply
moving at times, but the trio performs with such freedom within Bjora’s
structures that the whole journey feels like a game to them. And what power
it is to help others know the essence of wisdom is finding the humor in the
maelstrom.