Om utgivelsen
SORTLAND is the new album from acclaimed cellist Maja Bugge (NO/UK) and award-winning pianist Dave Evans (UK). It will be released in August 2026 on Norwegian label Finito Bacalao Records.
This work is a musical exploration of Maja’s home city, situated 68 degrees north above the arctic circle. The album has been developed from a commission from Ny Musikk Nordland for Sortland Jazz Festival 2023. The compositions on the album develop and present music found in the sounds of this place. They take as their starting points notions of heritage, location and belonging. They play with ideas of the impact climate change has on diminishing birdlife and nature and riff along with the sound of seagulls, fishing factories and boats.
At times joyful, at others quiet and vulnerable, this music experiments with space, stillness and repetition. It is not afraid to go to the strangest or quietest and most vulnerable of places.
Maja and Dave have been working together since 2023 and performed extensively both in Norway and the UK. Maja is an acclaimed and classical trained cellist now based in the UK. She has been active in many contexts in the Norwegian and UK jazz scene since the early 2000s, collaborating with, amongst others, Deep Cabaret, Terje Isungset and Elin Rosseland. She has been a commissioned artist at several jazz festivals, and in 2020 (along with Sarah Nicholls), made the film work Ballad of a Changing World. In 2024 she was commissioned by Bodo city of culture to create Suite for Seabirds, a work responding to and using the sounds of the endangered wildlife on the island of Vega in the North of Norway.
Steve Mead, Artistic Director of Manchester Jazz Festival has written how: Maja´s music has the power to transform the space around her yet reflect and absorb it, and in doing so she creates an almost meditative-like state in the listener. We are transported into a world of undulating landscapes, distant echoes and slowly evolving patterns by music, which has the strange ability to convey – at the same time – the familiar and the unfamiliar.
Based in Leeds, Dave has been active on the UK jazz scene for the past 20 years, and in 2023 won the Parliamentary Jazz award with his band Ubunye.
SORTLAND is a meeting between these acclaimed musicians. Developed through improvisation, and the sculpting of found sound/sonic elements, this work is a playful musical dialogue that offers space for the listener and celebrates an ever changing and shifting landscape.
Musikere
Maja Bugge - Cello, spoken word
Dave Evans - Piano, vocals
