Smiling & Waving

On her third album, Anja Garbarek made a significant leap – there’s a comfort in her songs and performance here that hadn’t really been present before, along with an increased bravery in arrangement and writing, and a tendency to leave things open and relatively unadorned. It might partly be down to the company she’s keeping here – the late Mark Hollis, of Talk Talk, arranges a few of the songs; Robert Wyatt guests on vocals; Steven Jansen and Richard Barbieri of Japan turn up on percussion and effects, respectively. If you’re thinking a kind of art song that hovers between pop and jazz, you’re not too far from what’s going on here, though that’s still slightly reductive: Garbarek’s muted voice, a shivering whisper of a thing, and her song writing, which hovers on the edges of abstraction, both give Smiling & Waving a curious, compelling distance.