(Hard Bop / Free Improvisation) Carsten Dahl / Arild Andersen / Patrice Heral - The Sign - 2002, FLAC (image+.cue), lossless

That nearly a third of the material on their debut, The Sign, is completely free improvisation, demonstrates the kind of simpatico that emerged during the trio's first tour. That it is sometimes difficult to differentiate the improvisations from the composed material — mostly by Dahl, but with one composition by Andersen — makes the trio's open-ended approach all the more remarkable.
While the trio explores a range of dynamics, the ambience on The Sign is one of space, texture and subtlety. On the collaborative piece "The 9th Day" Andersen creates a wash of bowed bass that is a subtle underpinning for his and Dahl's darker, more impressionistic overlays. Heral, combining kit work with a variety of hand percussion, adds colour rather than rhythmic thrust. He also contributes vocals that range from a gentle falsetto to a bass voice reminiscent of throat singing.
The trio is less about individual soloing, and more about a collective approach that finds everyone on equal footing. Dahl's "Escapes" begins with an abstract rubato passage that demonstrates how the trio, even with specific direction, are able to inject an element of freedom into the mix. The piece ultimately resolves into more identifiable form, with Heral playing more the rhythmist over a pedal tone vamp that gives both Andersen and Heral plenty of space, both rhythmically and harmonically. Dahl's debt to Keith Jarrett is clear.
"The Sorrow of Mankind", another Dahl composition, is suitably stark and spacious, with Dahl's playing delicate and spare. Andersen's characteristically warm and full sound and Heral's gentle percussion are in perfect accord with Dahl, building the piece from near silence to a more lyrical dramatic centre. On "Hyperborean", originally recorded on his own recording of the same name, Andersen substitutes real-time looping of arco bass, across the range of the instrument, for the string quartet that was on the original recording, and to great effect. The first three minutes are, in fact, Andersen on his own, layering fluttering pizzicato lines over the ambient backwash, with Dahl and Andersen finally entering and giving the piece more form.
The Sign has little to do with the American jazz tradition, being rooted, instead, in a more European impressionism. There's clearer precedence in the generally austere ECM approach than there is in anything that remotely resembles, for example, swing. Still, the collaborative 'Crawl Before You Walk' centres on a gentle walking pulse that belies a greater understanding of the American tradition, albeit radically transformed and placed in a generally more ethereal context.
~ John Kelman, AAJ

Exact Audio Copy V0.99 prebeta 4 from 23. January 2008
EAC extraction logfile from 15. March 2009, 14:30
Carsten Dahl / Arild Andersen / Patrice Heral / The Sign
Used drive : TSSTcorpCD/DVDW SH-S182M Adapter: 2 ID: 0
Read mode : Secure
Utilize accurate stream : Yes
Defeat audio cache : Yes
Make use of C2 pointers : No
Read offset correction : 6
Overread into Lead-In and Lead-Out : No
Fill up missing offset samples with silence : Yes
Delete leading and trailing silent blocks : No
Null samples used in CRC calculations : Yes
Used interface : Installed external ASPI interface
Used output format : User Defined Encoder
Selected bitrate : 1024 kBit/s
Quality : High
Add ID3 tag : No
Command line compressor : C:\Program Files\Exact Audio Copy\FLAC\FLAC.EXE
Additional command line options : -8 -V -T "ARTIST=%a" -T "TITLE=%t" -T "ALBUM=%g" -T "DATE=%y" -T "TRACKNUMBER=%n" -T "GENRE=%m" -T "COMMENT=%e" %s -o %d
TOC of the extracted CD
Track | Start | Length | Start sector | End sector
---------------------------------------------------------
1 | 0:00.00 | 8:58.32 | 0 | 40381
2 | 8:58.32 | 4:30.46 | 40382 | 60677
3 | 13:29.03 | 4:21.45 | 60678 | 80297
4 | 17:50.48 | 9:42.52 | 80298 | 123999
5 | 27:33.25 | 6:02.65 | 124000 | 151214
6 | 33:36.15 | 7:49.07 | 151215 | 186396
7 | 41:25.22 | 9:38.58 | 186397 | 229804
8 | 51:04.05 | 4:47.12 | 229805 | 251341
9 | 55:51.17 | 2:03.61 | 251342 | 260627
Range status and errors
Selected range
Filename C:\Documents and Settings\Igor\My Documents\My Music\eac\Dahl Andersen Heral - The Sign.wav
Peak level 97.7 %
Range quality 99.9 %
Test CRC 4056E242
Copy CRC 4056E242
Copy OK
No errors occurred
AccurateRip summary
Track 1 accurately ripped (confidence 2) [2AAC7558]
Track 2 accurately ripped (confidence 2) [D41D13B1]
Track 3 accurately ripped (confidence 2) [1F102A23]
Track 4 accurately ripped (confidence 2) [B722FDEA]
Track 5 accurately ripped (confidence 2) [F5E7DA2D]
Track 6 accurately ripped (confidence 2) [7B8A27EE]
Track 7 accurately ripped (confidence 2) [77432AA3]
Track 8 accurately ripped (confidence 2) [C6AC9610]
Track 9 accurately ripped (confidence 2) [0E2F57B6]
All tracks accurately ripped
End of status report