Ted Olsen Violette

Violette, by bassist/composer Ted Olsen, features genre-blurring chamber works performed by a powerhouse ensemble with guests Aby Wolf, John Raymond, and Minnesota Orchestra members. Blending jazz, classical, and songcraft, this emotionally rich music marks the peak of Olsen’s creative surge since winning the McKnight Composers Fellowship, inviting both heart and mind into its expressive world.

Liner Notes:

Ted Olsen has a longstanding interest in the melancholy romanticism of autumn and twilight, as evidenced by early compositions such as “October Hues” and “Crepuscular Sketches” and most richly explored on this new album, an ambitious set of songs and compositions for chamber ensemble. In the bassist, composer, and songwriter’s “Dusk, WSQ,” featuring the singer Aby Wolf, it’s both twilight and fall, more specifically and perhaps referentially, autumn in New York. (The “WSQ” refers to Washington Square rather than World Saxophone Quartet, though maybe they’re on hand, too.) After a contemplative, composed piano introduction played by Will Kjeer, Wolf and Kjeer take the first verse as duo. A distinguished songwriter in her own right, Wolf is also a perceptive interpreter, risk-taking but understated . Kjeer, a precise player and composer of growing reputation, is here a tender accompanist and, later, an inventive improviser on a short, climactic solo. Olsen’s imagistic words track the end of an affair from some distance. “We become ivy,” Wolf sings around the song’s midpoint, “expanding as we blossom intertwined,” and the music has grown similarly, drummer Ben Ehrlich’s brushwork leading the rhythm section by the second verse, strings ushering in the chorus and going on to offer eloquent responses and a pleasing interlude. The lyric twice references Joni Mitchell, and though she’s only one of the album’s touchstones, her blend of pop savvy and formal adventure is honored. On “Dusk” and the album as a whole, Olsen’s writing is careful and complex but not fastidious, his melodies challenging but not thorny, his ideas clear but not obvious.



The album is played by the Violette Ensemble, a chamber group Olsen formed in 2021 partly to realize a book of pieces supported and spurred by a McKnight Foundation fellowship awarded by the American Composers Forum. The album’s personnel shifts from track to track, as the credits detail, but along with Olsen on double bass, you’ll hear vocalists Wolf and Eric Mayson, flutist Alicia McQuerrey, trumpeter and flugelhornist John Raymond, bass clarinetist Paul Schimming, violinists Sarah Grimes and Ernest Bisong, violist Lydia Grimes, cellist Sonia Mantell, Kjeer, and Ehrlich. The playing is responsive, the orchestrations vivid. Though the emphasis is on Olsen’s writing, there’s room for the players to improvise or otherwise shine. Raymond’s flugelhorn feature and solo on the impressionistic “To Acquiesce” is full of sunburst runs, expressive long notes, and microtonal cries. Olsen himself improvises under, over, and through the ensemble writing at the top of “Present Tense.” That piece, written for the strings only, depicts, I believe, a tousled Scandinavian boatbuilder writing a brooding letter in an oaky living room before deciding, with growing optimism, that the message should be delivered in person.



On the LP configuration, those just-mentioned pieces are the two instrumentals. The LP’s other three pieces—“Split Rock Postcard,” “Dusk, WSQ,” and “Aubaude (Violet),” written with Wolf—are hybridic art songs grounded in jazz but equally inspired by pop, R&B, and classical principles and procedures. Lyrical repetition, rhyme, and outright hooks are rare but there are choruses and welcoming melodies, both for the singers and the instrumentalists. Olsen has written songs before, but here his work as composer, songwriter, and arranger is integrated with rare grace, and the border between the vocal and instrumental material isn’t sternly patrolled. It’s a rangy but unified sound. The ensemble’s other singer, Eric Mayson, collaborates with Wolf (and Olsen) in the chamber-pop group Champagne Confetti, and, like Wolf, he’s a flexible and expressive singer.



Though Violette’s LP sequence presents a satisfying arc, the album’s digital cousin isn’t padded with addenda but instead tells a comparably rich if more leisurely story. “Intermezzo (Bloom),” for instance, on which Raymond is again spotlit, is lovely. “Bright Star,” with an outstretched vocal from Mayson, has the singer with just the ensemble’s piano trio. This smaller group, too, is admirably colorful and dynamic. That song’s narrative ends in the most final way. But you’re alive and can listen again.



–Dylan Hicks