Green Moss Black Sand

New album from Scandinavian jazz stars

Green Moss Black Sand explores the rough, overwhelming and stark beauty of Scandinavian nature and its dark sensibilities. It is jazz with a special bluesy and folksy Nordic sound and a characteristic mix of grandeur and minimalism.

Sigurdur Flosason plays the alto saxophone and he says the following about the new record “The music on this CD is inspired by the highlands of the country that raised me, my native Iceland. The desert-like wasteland holds a singular kind of beauty. Perhaps not pretty in the usual sense of the word, it is beautiful in its stark and rough contrasts. There, beauty lies in the small, in the slow-growing moss with its endless hues of colour, in the black sand stretching as far as the eye can see, in the fragile highland growth and the fresh spring water quietly streaming forth from beneath majestic lava fields. The music is my dedication to the heart of my country and the people who brought me there, my parents.”

Icelandic beauty is the weather capable of changing in the blink of an eye; it is in the stillness and in the storm; in the rain falling at a slant, sometimes almost horizontally; in the sky that has colours you see nowhere else; green when visited by the Aurora Borealis. And then there is the ever present moon, there at the end of the world. This hushed yet ferocious type of beauty is explored on Green Moss Black Sand.

Along with the Lars Jansson Trio, Flosason captures the Nordic nuances with fervour and precision. Lars Jansson is a Swedish jazz pianist and a composer, and the Lars Jansson Trio counts Jansson as well as the Dane Thomas Fonnesbæk on double bass, and the Swede Paul Svanberg on drums. Flosason is from Iceland and is trained as a classical alto saxophonist. Although he primarily plays jazz, he has worked extensively with various Scandinavian musicians such as Cathrine Legardh, Kjeld Lauritsen, and Kristian Leth, and has composed both jazz music and classical pieces. The musicianship, generosity and friendship of the group make the musical images of rural Iceland come to life.

Buy the album here.