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Terje Rypdal


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Terje Rypdal (born 23 August 1947 in Oslo) is a Norwegian guitarist and composer. Most of his music has been released on several albums of the German record label ECM.
His compositions "Last Nite" and "Mystery Man" were featured in the Michael Mann film Heat, and included on the soundtrack of the same name
Perhaps the most overlooked guitarist in the invisible Catalogue of All Things Progressive, Terje (commonly anglicized as "Terrie" though it's properly pronounced "Ter-yuh," or so I'm informed by those hailing from the region) Rypdal is prolific and perfectly at home in the progressive alley, though chiefly ignored there. Here was a guy inescapably destined for musicianhood. The son of a composer and orchestra leader, Rypdal studied classical piano and trumpet as a child, and then taught himself to play guitar as he entered his teens. At age 15, he formed the Vanguards, a Hank Marvin and the Shadows-inspired band that had a string of hits during the early-to-mid-’60s. By 1967, he was performing Are You Experienced? in its entirety live, as part of his band Dream’s repertoire. Other early rock influences included Jeff Beck, Bluesbreakers-era Eric Clapton, and Stevie Winwood (who personally taught a teenaged Rypdal how to use a Marshall amp after a Spencer Davis Group concert). In that frame, making a move to expose his solo work, the Dream LP having been sufficiently impressive, Bleak House released in 1968. The experience garnered with these ventures was one he greatly enjoyed and decided him to forsake former aspirations in electrical engineering, getting serious about music theory and attending the Oslo Music Conservatory (now the Norwegian State Academy of Music). Thus ensconced, Rypdal played in the pit band for a Nordic staging of Hair, wetting his professional feet. Continued studies led first to the regionally well-respected Finn Mortensen and thence to George Russell, who espoused a unique Lydian Chromatic Concept of Tonal Organization. Russell immediately recognized a formidable talent when he saw it, enlisting the young axeslinger to play on his recordings.
An important step towards international attention was his participation in the free jazz festival in Baden-Baden, Germany in 1969, where he was part of a band led by Lester Bowie. During his musical studies at Oslo university and conservatory, he led the orchestra of the Norwegian version of the musical Hair. He has often been recorded on the ECM record label, both jazz-oriented material and classical compositions (some of which do not feature Rypdal's guitar).
Rypdal has collaborated both as a guitarist and as a composer with other ECM artists such as Ketil Bjornstad and David Darling. Over the years, he has been an important member in the Norwegian jazz community.
Rypdal’s interest in classical music was reignited in 1968 after seeing 2001: A Space Odyssey. In addition to performing and recording with Jan Garbarek, he accompanied Lester Bowie at the historic Baden-Baden Free Jazz Meeting in 1969, and studied and worked with pianist/composer/theorist George Russell. As a composer Rypdal received his first impulses from Ligeti, Penderecki and Mahler and he soon developed his own style. His début as a composer was with "Eternal Circulation" (1971), performed with Jan Garbarek Quartet and Oslo Philharmonic Orchestra. Among his works can be mentioned: Symphony No. 1 (1975) commissioned by the Norwegian Television. His opera "Orfeo Turns Around and Watches Eurydice", premiered in 1972 at the Henie Onstad Art Centre outside Oslo. For the American bass player Barre Phillipps we wrote his "Concerto per violbasso e orchestra" (1973). His violin concerto "Undisonus" received the prize "Work of the Year" by the Society of Norwegian Composers.

Odyssey issued (1975), a double-LP, just as the progrock movement was hitting the end of its not-very-long apogee in the musical landscape. What the Moody Blues, Hendrix, King Crimson et al had wrought was in full flower but would soon start its multi-year topple. Rypdal was never very much in the genre's eye but savvy consumers knew both him and the impeccable ECM, constantly on the lookout for new material from each. Few musicians could be said to be molded in the same spirit of extreme adventurousness and wide open possibilities as Terje. Brynwulfe Blix played a highly unorthodox organ- slow, spacy, never once betraying itself as the perennial instrument of favor amongst boozy, business-suited, cocktail bar habitants. His application of it dealt in a wholly synthesizerish spin, advantaging long drawn out nuances that few to that time, or since, ever bothered with. The whole five piece fell perfectly into cerebrally somnambulistic trancing on "Rolling Stone," one of Rypdal's early classics, a truncated version of which would appear on the rare-ish New Jazz Festival '75 disc. The guitarist's style was fairly settled now and he'd hold to it for an appreciable period, to the delight of a building fan base.
Mikkelborg and Christenson returned and the guitarist took up keyboards once again for the John Surman-ish intro to Descendre (1980), appropriately tapping out declivitous notes for "Avskjed," a different affair from Waves, funereal in its long slow rock base. Guitar and trumpet, for one, were now mated for a lament of Hesse-ian proportions. Mikkelborg remains remarkaby tamed to the vision, so the carry-over eerieness of the previous disc is cut only by an occasional distant night-slickness, an atmosphere trumpets are so heir to. Rock pulses, never a high-profile ingredient, return in "Innseiling," rev'ing up the blood. Nowhere, though, does the previous "Stenskoven" bedlam-circus traipse in, thus the normative Usherian pall remained. Rypdal prefers not to stray far from his unique mindset and doesn't have to, the entire mode's so far beyond the pale of standard recital that any notion of competition would be slight and seldom; moreover, the listener must ever come to him, not the other way around.
1991 saw the release of Q.E.D., with a 14-piece small orchestra (Rypdal included) plus conductor, signaling that the player-composer was leaving behind the morés of the past. The years since have seen him engaging in further fantastic opuses with orchestras and ensembles, maintaining his presence but scripting largely to wring full-scale adventures away from the previous more intimate process. That these works have been dauntingly impressive is beyond dispute, but they separated him fully from his guitar-based work and so it's here that we cease
He's placed within the pantheon through accomplishments as an extremely iconoclastic musician who spent two decades constantly polishing and extending a niche all his own, excelling within it like few have anywhere, even in much more familiar derivative milieus. Only the tiniest fraction of players can claim to have produced as unique a sound as Terje Rypdal: Holdsworth, Fripp, Hendrix, and not many others beyond.
Classically trained pianist and self-thought guitarist, he studied classical music composition, and also played flute, soprano sax, ARP Strings Ensemble Synth. Terje Rypdal is 36-years veteran of the ECM Records.
Terje Rypdal's compositions witness his versatile musical work, his rich imagination and solid knowledge. One can find poetic moments with an almost impressionistic colour as well as constellations of sound with elements from jazz, late romanticism and avantgardism. In addition to his large production of modern art music he has also a great number of jazz and rock compositions.


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