Karin Krog is one of the great jazz singers. Few others worked within so many different areas of the music and fewer still could have done so with the same assurance, commitment and elegance. Last years six CD box set “The Many Faces Of Karin Krog” released on the occasion of her eightieth birthday received glowing reviews all over. The new album “On A Misty Night” collects her recordings of Tadd Dameron´s music with the great Georgie Fame and includes two previously unreleased tracks – all brilliantly arranged by Norwegian pianist, arranger and composer Per Husby.
Recording
An initial recording session was done in Oslo in 1983, but only produced four tracks that, in the end, were never issued. The project was then presented live at the Molde Jazz Festival in 1984. Again, a recording tape was running, but there were a number of sound problems that made a full issue of the concert impossible.
Thanks to the support and help of Jon Larsen and his label Hot Club Records, we at last managed to record a selection of Dameron’s music in January 1985. By this time I had also presented this project to Georgie Fame, who volunteered to write lyrics to some of the numbers that were originally written just as instrumentals.
The resulting CD in fact became what in the jazz world might be labelled as something of a success – earning a Norwegian Grammy for best jazz record of the year, as well as ending up on lists of critics’ favourites in magazines like Cadence (US), The Gramophone (UK) and Jazz (France). The realities of jazz economy soon hit the project after this.
Dedication
After a few local club gigs around Oslo the project as a live act was shelved. Ten years later, however, jazz enthusiast and record label owner Bjørn Petersen volunteered to finance a rebirth of the project – this time taking it over to its homeland and recording it in New York with local musicians.
History repeated itself however, so that after another impressive batch of critics’ endorsements the project again ended up on the shelf – there being no way of finding the funds needed to do more with it. And on that shelf it would probably still have rested if it hadn’t been for Karin, who last year intiated the idea of reissuing the Dameron tracks from the two CDs. The original title for the first CD was ‘Dedications’ – and there is therefore nothing more appropriate for me, 32 years later, than to dedicate this reissue to Karin Krog and Tadd Dameron – without whom the project would not have been possible.
