Jazz
Newvelle Records · 7 August 2026
Thirty-seven minutes, ten pieces, nothing over five minutes twenty: “For All Your Flowers” works in miniature. Skúli Sverrisson plays electric bass and double bass, Bill Frisell plays guitar, and that’s the whole cast. It was recorded in New York in June 2025 and came out on 7 August as part of Newvelle Records’ Ten Collection, the five-album 180-gram vinyl series marking the label’s tenth anniversary; Martin Wind, Ingrid Jensen, Elan Mehler and Loren Stillman head the other four.
Nine of the ten compositions are Sverrisson’s. The other is Frisell’s “Baby”, and it’s also where he’s most recognisably himself. “A Little Closer” has a baroque cast across three fourteen; “Further Down the Road” is a slow walk of four fifty-six in which the two instruments end up indistinguishable; on the title track Frisell stops picking and strikes bright chords, which he barely does anywhere else. “Please Continue”, one thirty-five, is the shortest piece and the clearest counterpoint between the two of them.
The price of that coherence is that the record never changes temperature. Volume, tempo and character are much the same from the first track to the last, and pieces like “Here We Are” (two fifty-six) are gone before they’ve finished settling. The duo had already recorded together on “Strata” (Newvelle, 2018), taped in New York in 2017. Sverrisson, who has played on more than a hundred records (Allan Holdsworth’s “Hard Hat Area”, from 1993, among them), is here the one writing and the one staying behind.
Rating: 8.0/10
Text by Aina Torrents