Jazz
Sonic Transmissions Records · 18 September 2026
The album opens with Mort Garson’s “Plantasia”, played on a slightly out-of-tune piano. Two minutes thirty-seven, and the detuning is a decision rather than a fault: Anna Ueland names that 1976 record of music for houseplants among her references, and what she does here is move it off the Moog and onto an acoustic piano that is not quite in place, with trombone and tenor saxophone holding it up.
Ueland trained as a physicist and works as a keyboard player and singer, and on “Sugar in the Morning” she sets aside the electronics and nearly all the singing to stay at the piano. The quintet is Guro Kvåle on trombone, Åsne Fossmark on tenor saxophone, Kertu Aer on double bass and Gustav Tornberg on drums, with Tor Haugerud on percussion on two tracks. Her other groups pull in other directions: with Babies On Airplanes she released “Music For A Noisy Environment” this same year and on this same label, and with Populærmusikk for likesinnede she works a string-led jazz-pop.
“Kidz Zone” (8:04) is the longest track and the one that goes deepest into sixties modal jazz. “There’s Always a Bigger Fish” (4:03) is in nine and stamps hardest. “KWYJIBO” (2:18) is the freest stretch on the record, and the title track closes it with seven minutes and four seconds of a brightness of tone not far from some of Abdullah Ibrahim’s pieces.
Ueland names sixties free jazz, present-day Scandinavian jazz and French impressionism, and all three can be heard separately: the modal playing on “Kidz Zone”, the two horns on “There’s Always a Bigger Fish”, the piano on “Plantasia”. None of them governs the others. There is a problem of scale as well: five of the nine pieces come in under four and a half minutes, and with two horns out front the room left for Kvåle and Fossmark is tight. Two tracks take fifteen of the thirty-nine minutes; the other seven share what is left and close before they have gone anywhere.
Sonic Transmissions Records, 18 September 2026. Nine tracks, 39:41. Anna Ueland (piano), Guro Kvåle (trombone), Åsne Fossmark (tenor saxophone), Kertu Aer (double bass) and Gustav Tornberg (drums), with Tor Haugerud on percussion on “Kidz Zone” and the title track.
Rating: 7.1/10
Text by Aina Torrents