Smiling And Waving

Anja is the singing daughter of Jan Garbarek, composer and jazz saxist. But it’s not just any old singing. The Norwegian Anja has a unique style, as mesmerising as Robert Wyatt and as eccentric and darkly Scandinavian as Bjork, but generally softer and woven into more complex song structures than the Icelandic pixie would normally inhabit. She has a very expressive range and draws more emotion from a short phrase than many of her rivals get from an entire career, and she can do little girl lost and rampant sex siren to order.

In fact the afore-mentioned Wyatt makes a guest appearance on this, Anja’s third album, for the creepily unsettling ‘The Diver’. The double bass is often more upfront on most tracks that you expect, especially in ‘Spin The Context’ and the playing is always impeccable, with the wistful ‘And Then’ being a particularly rewarding musical experience.

The instrumentation throughout is a subtle blend of the acoustic and the electronic with most tracks taken at a pace slower than walking, and the arrangements and the performing style challenge many musical conventions.

Smiling And Waving is not for the faint-hearted, having touches of avant-garde quirkiness that some might baulk at, but it reveals a truly original talent and deeper profundities on repeated listens.