It will be a spectacular opening concert at this year’s Maijazz. Singer Rebekka Bakken has recently released what may be her best and most personal album – NORD. It received a 6/6 rating from Tor Hammerø, music critic at Nettavisen and a jazz connoisseur of the highest calibre.
With the album NORD, Rebekka Bakken turns her gaze – and compass – northward, both musically and existentially. The album is a journey into her personal roots and outward towards something universal. Sung mainly in Norwegian, “because it is my root, my language, my air”, with touches of English and Arabic, she merges traditional folk melodies and new compositions into an organic, timeless, and spiritual expression.
The songs have accompanied her since childhood – prayers, lamentations, and lullabies she associates with her mother’s voice and the resonance of church spaces. Now she breathes new life into them: “NORD is not an archive,” she emphasises, “it is a heartbeat. It is my way of turning tradition into pulse. To make the old vibrate again.”
The album was recorded in four days at Kongshavn Studio with a stellar lineup of musicians: Rune Arnesen, Stein Austrud (also producer), Eivind Aarset, and Svein Schultz, along with guests Hildegunn Øiseth, Saleh Mahfoud, and Simon Issát Marainen. Particularly My Choicest Hours, with lyrics by Sufi poet Rabia al-Basri and a duet with Mahfoud, opens the album to a larger, international landscape.
Thematically, NORD revolves around longing, love, doubt, and hope – the universal human experience. The music carries both Norwegian folk tones and a blues-like gravity: “suffering that insists on becoming beauty,” as Bakken says.
“Every note, every breath, all of me is in this album,” says Rebekka Bakken. “I really felt I had to give everything I have, and hold nothing back,” she adds, reflecting on living with these songs since childhood. “I carried them with me without thinking of them,” she explains. “I didn’t appreciate them back then. But later in life, they returned, full of their own power, asking to be expressed. It took years before I felt ready to release them as I truly heard them.”
The result is exceptionally beautiful. Jazz critic Hammerø writes: “She appears with a strength, credibility, and personality that, to my ears, elevates her into an elite tier wherever on Earth you look. Rebekka Bakken deserves all the attention she can get. She has, and indeed possesses, one of the most magnificent voices surrounding us.”
Duration: TBA
Organiser: Maijazz