For quite a
while during her concert, young Danish singer Malene Mortensen’s music sounds
exactly as on her new record Date With A Dream (Stunt Records). That’s both
good and not so good.
Good
because the record is really a high-class production. Not so good because the
concert experience must give more musical bonus.
But this
comes. It takes half a CD before Malene releases her brilliant voice and leaves
her script, but when she does, it is very convincing.
Mortensen
goes between jazz and pop, sings covers on Joni Mitchell and Anita Baker as
passionately as she does Paul Desmond’s Take Five or her own songs Egyptian
Moonlight or Blur. She might not stand so firmly in all the texts, but she
sings Mitchell’s All I Want with the utmost concern for the meaning of the
words. This is also definitely the case in a fragile ballad by the recently
deceased Niels-Henning Ørsted Pedersen.
This might
be the next really big Danish vocalist that we hear at Nefertiti.
She has the
potential, and has during the last few years had great help on her way from
music school product to full-grown artist by steady jazzmen such as NHØP,
drummer Axel Riel and pianist Niels Lan Doky.
She has
that brilliance in her voice, and that tonal confidence and harmonic knowledge
which gives her the ability to improvise within the phrases, and ad-lib some
text lines.
In a few
songs she also releases the full power of her voice, making it easy to think
that the Danish dynamite is still in production.
Strongly
contributing is of course the dynamic trio with pianist Kasper Villaume, bass
player Morten Ankarfeldt and drummer Ramus Kihlberg. Villaume is a brilliant piano
player, both when accompanying and when soloing with a dexterous right hand.
Villaume also produced Date with a dream, with Avishai Cohen on bass.
The Israeli
bass star Cohen shows up down at the club to listen. He is in town to record a
trio under his own name down in Kållered, and now he enters the stage for a
rather erotic duo version of old Willow Weep For Me.
Malene
Mortensen and the band do two encores. First Mortensen’s own Aarestrup In
March, and then Take Five.
And it is
so fine, so fine.
It is
simply “smuk”.
Ulf Johansson, Göteborgs-Posten