Ingeborg Gravem Sollid: The Aftermath

Some albums feel like an invitation to join a benevolent planet where things are effortlessly explained through poetry. So does The Aftermath (Fjordgata Records, 2026), where a sense of well-being rapidly settles in, nourished by the beauty of the compositions and the sustained intelligence of the interpretation. The group is a quartet led by vocalist Ingeborg Gravem Sollid, who graduated in 2023 from the prestigious jazz programme (Jazzlinja) at the University of Trondheim.

Before this first album under her own name, for which she wrote all the compositions, Sollid explored various jazz facets: experimental with Meson (Roselyd, 2022), the piano-vocal duo with Blue Room (Fjordgata Records, 2025), and chamber jazz with the most surprising Sølvtrå (Øra Fonogram, 2025).

The Aftermath is not a collection of themes with accompanied improvisations. Musicality and mutual listening turn each composition into a particular sonic synergy that flows into the next composition. Thus does the album take shape and develop. Sollid's voice serves instrumental improvisations and texts in which distance, the sky, the ocean, waves, tides, storms, become existential and resonate with the superb album artwork, created by visual artist Sofie Berrefjord.

Youthful purity is not yet inhabited by the strata of time. The freshness of Sollid's voice is effervescent and virtuosic, precise and supple. Her originality is calligraphic: a frank and deliberate attack that slides for a brief moment before resuming the direction of the line.

"BLUE" illuminates the album. The melody, in the form of a question mark, soars ever higher into the stratosphere. It gradually gains amplitude, with a masterly art of staging. The piece particularly highlights the vibraphone of Amund Stenøien, whose playing is smart and distinguished, with a melodic and rhythmic assurance already evident in his quartet in Coming To Pass (Sonic Transmissions Records, 2023) and in Alex Ventling 's Wavemakers (Particular Recordings Collective, 2025).

"Escape your Eyes" is also radiant. Groove suits Stenøien decidedly well, with the insistent rhythm driven by the bass of Håkon Huldt-Nystrøm and propelled by Trym Saugstad Karlsen's assertive though subtle drumming.

Huldt-Nystrøm's singing bass, round and deep, superbly comes through in "Tides," and also in "No Fantasy," a composition whose text, however disillusioned it may be, curiously leaves a humorous impression.

In this first album as leader, Sollid shows that having deeply explored the meanderings of jazz, she has found her planet, whose territory she now sets about mapping poetically. An assured and original voice, for which we are grateful to Fjordgata Records, a label that champions artistic independence, for having given her the space to bloom.

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