Homage to Legends - Rohey Taalah & Martin Myhre Olsen
Voice and saxophone are close relations. Both begin with breath; both can carry melody, shape language, bend pitch, roughen into texture or open into pure sound. Yet they are rarely left entirely alone together. Without piano, bass or drums, there is nowhere for either musician to disappear—and no predetermined division between soloist and accompaniment.
On Homage to Legends, vocalist Rohey Taalah and saxophonist Martin Myhre Olsen embrace that exposure. Working with voice, saxophones and occasional percussion, they seek orchestral breadth through the most economical of means. There are no overdubs, loop pedals, harmonisers, or layers of studio multiplication. Everything depends upon the range of sound two musicians can create in the moment, and upon the space they are willing to leave around it.
Rather than making the music feel bare, that space becomes one of the duo’s principal resources. Silence participates in the arrangements, allowing a breath, a held note, or a sudden shift of register to acquire unusual weight. Taalah and Myhre Olsen move continually between roles: melody and countermelody, rhythm and suspension, statement, and response. At times, the saxophone supports the voice; elsewhere it provokes, shadows, or contradicts it. Their occasional passages in unison arrive with particular force, briefly drawing two highly individual sounds into one sharply focused line.
The album grew from a desire to explore this close relationship while working with songs that hold deep personal meaning for Taalah. Its title does not describe a conventional survey of jazz history. Instead, Homage to Legends traces a private musical inheritance, moving freely between jazz standards, soul, folk, singer-songwriter repertoire, and contemporary composition.
The programme includes music by George and Ira Gershwin, Joni Mitchell, Laura Mvula and Steve Brown, Leslie Bricusse, and Anthony Newley, Isham Jones and Marty Symes, Jaco Pastorius, Jimmy Webb, and Gerry Goffin, Carole King and Jerry Wexler. The traditional “Bright Sunny South” appears in a new arrangement by the duo, while three original compositions - “Orange Faint of Sky,” “The Impending Collapse” and “A Call to the Wailing Women” - place Taalah and Myhre Olsen’s own voices directly within the lineage they are honouring.
“I selected songs that are close to my heart, each carrying deep personal meaning,” says Taalah. “Together, we offer these interpretations as an homage to the legends who have given us timeless gifts through their music.”
These are not museum-piece recreations. The familiar material is approached with respect, but also with the freedom required to make it live again. Some songs retain much of their established emotional and melodic shape; others are loosened, energised or turned towards a different perspective. Wistfulness may become directness, romantic resignation acquires a glimmer of humour or self-awareness, and familiar structures open into spaces where improvisation can redirect the music entirely. The duo follow the implications of lyric, melody, and mood rather than attempting to preserve the architecture of an earlier recording.
Nor are the covers and originals kept in separate compartments. Transitions between composed material and improvisation blur the boundary between inheritance and invention, allowing one to grow naturally from the other. The words may fall away altogether, leaving melody, breath and texture to carry the emotional argument; elsewhere, an unaccompanied voice establishes the character of a song before the arrival of the saxophone alters its weight and momentum. Across the album, reverence coexists with curiosity, playfulness and moments of controlled instability. Homage to Legends becomes not a sequence of dutiful tributes, but a continuous conversation between memory, interpretation, and new creation.
Throughout the album, Taalah draws upon a remarkable range of vocal colour. Melisma, scat, growls, sustained lines and non-verbal sounds are used not as ornament, but as structural material. Her voice can carry lyric and rhythm simultaneously, moving from intimacy to formidable power without losing its individual character. Myhre Olsen answers with equal flexibility: fluid improvisations, breath-tones, percussive articulation and extended techniques appear as expressive necessities rather than displays of virtuosity. His background as a composer and arranger is audible in the balance of the performances, where even the freest moments retain a strong sense of shape.
Taalah first came to wide attention with the future-soul quartet Rohey, whose 2017 debut A Million Things established her as one of the most distinctive voices in Scandinavian soul-jazz. She later joined saxophonist Hanna Paulsberg and bassist Ellen Andrea Wang in GURLS, whose Run Boy, Run won the Spellemann Award in Jazz. Her work has also included collaborations with Susanne Sundfør, Jarle Bernhoft and Trondheim Jazz Orchestra, as well as original music for the dance work Horde at the MUNCH Museum. Dagsavisen has described her as “one of the country’s strongest voices.”
Saxophonist, composer, and arranger Martin Myhre Olsen has become an equally distinctive presence in contemporary Norwegian jazz. Educated at NTNU’s Jazz Programme, he is known through Wako, Megalodon Collective, the Spellemann-winning Hegge, his own MMO-Ensemble and Trondheim Jazz Orchestra. His work ranges from intimate improvisation to large-ensemble composition and has included performances with Chick Corea’s Akoustic Band and the Czech National Symphony Orchestra following a personal invitation from Corea.
Both musicians therefore arrive at this duo with extensive experience of larger ensembles and broader musical architectures. Homage to Legends reverses that scale. Instead of distributing harmony, rhythm, colour and momentum among many players, Taalah and Myhre Olsen concentrate them within two breath-driven voices.
The result is intimate without being slight, spacious without becoming empty, and reverent without surrendering its own identity. By placing songs from different generations and traditions within the same exposed setting, Homage to Legends treats musical inheritance not as a collection of sealed monuments, but as something living: passed between artists, transformed through performance, and carried forward in new sound.