Det er vi - Solveig Slettahjell Quartet
For Solveig Slettahjell, songs have never been fixed objects. They change according to who is playing them, opening themselves differently from one performance to another. On Det er vi, her eighteenth album and the third with the Solveig Slettahjell Quartet, that process turns towards home. For the first time since Tarpan Seasons, the centre of an album is once again Slettahjell’s own material.
With Andreas Ulvo, Trygve Waldemar Fiske and Pål Hausken, Slettahjell has developed a quartet in which space is as important as sound, and Det er vi makes no attempt to disturb that balance for the sake of spectacle. This is, almost entirely, an album of ballads: unhurried songs in which voice, piano, bass and drums are allowed to find their own weight and placement. Violinist Sara Rose Angelique Övinge and cellist Ole Eirik Ree extend the palette without breaking its intimacy.
Ulvo's piano sits particularly close to the centre. It doesn't merely accompany Solveig’s voice; songs open into small piano-trio spaces, melodies give way to instrumental thought, and the quartet moves between jazz, chamber music, and older traditions of song without announcing the borders. At times there are traces of another musical age in the writing: the composed ballad, the parlour song, the nocturnal jazz standard, the sophisticated pop song. They are memories rather than masks or costumes. Det er vi is not concerned with novelty for its own sake. Its movement is subtler, taking familiar forms and finding out what they can still hold.
What they hold, above all, is the question contained in the album's title. Det er vi: it is us. But who exactly is we?
Slettahjell's new songs circle around hope, love, uncertainty, and the negotiations by which people live together. In the title song, the apparently simple progression of “deg”, “meg” and “vi” gradually becomes something less certain: if there is no I, then who are we? The small diplomacy of a relationship begins to resemble the larger diplomacy of living in a difficult world.
Across the album, that question is repeatedly answered through images of movement, seasons and renewal. A song imagined on a blank page takes flight, finds another park and another listener, then returns home to find nourishment among familiar trees.
In Vence, people gather sunlight, friends and memories against winter and the long wait for spring.
Kaj Munk's Den blå anemone finds hope in the tiny, stubborn fact of a flower surviving hostile soil, while Olaf Bull's Ved et glas vin en vaarnat looks outward from a glass of wine into the night, the stars and mortality.
These poems sit naturally beside Slettahjell's own Norwegian lyrics, continuing the quartet's exploration of Nordic song while placing her songwriting firmly at its centre. Even Reis med meg, built from colours, places, weather, and fragments of experience, eventually asks where a song lives and whether it can travel north.
There are no grand answers here, musical or otherwise. Jeg kom sent instead embraces contradiction: clarity and concealment, high and low, faith and doubt, everything and nothing, day and night. At the end of all that uncertainty there remains one other person: deg.
Perhaps that is where Det er vi ultimately locates its hope. Not in optimism as an abstract idea, but in something practised at close range: listening, adjusting, waiting, travelling, and returning. The quartet does much the same. Four musicians leave room for one another, and ten quiet songs are allowed to unfold at their own pace.
Det er vi. Not me, not you: What happens in the space between.