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Haftor Medboe
Originally from Norway, Haftor has made his home in Edinburgh where he is Jazz Musician in Residence at the city’s Napier University. His compositional techniques were honed writing numerous film and TV scores and producing jazz and contemporary classical commissions for theatre, dance and concert performance. As a guitarist he has toured European and American jazz clubs and festivals both as band leader and side-man.
Susan McKenzie
Susan is one of those rare musicians that is equally at home with classical and improvised disciplines. After training at the Royal College of Music, London, where she was 3 times winner of the Jane Melber Memorial Prize she went on to win the Clarinet and Saxophone Society of Great Britain Young Performers Competition in 1994. Since then she has become much sought after on both classical and jazz circuits playing regularly with Salsa Celtica and pianist Ingrid Sawyers.
This album is the realisation of a dream for me.
The music was written in Edinburgh in the autumn of 2004 as a development of ideas that had evolved through collaboration with fellow musicians and friends Signy Jakobsdottir, Sue McKenzie and Chris Greive.
The four of us had already made one album together and I was keen to keep the winning formula for this one. As the melodies took shape it became clear that strings would work well with the material and I invited the Edinburgh Quartet to work with us on the recording.
Having secured their services the challenge was then to fuse the Quartet’s classical discipline with our more improvisatory approaches in a meaningful way. The result is this album, which,
I hope you agree, shows that genre definition doesn’t have to be a barrier and that melody and performance are what really count.
I sincerely thank everybody involved for their efforts and understanding in bringing this music to life and hope that you enjoy the fruits of our labours.
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