Light is Danish jazz legend Palle Mikkelborg’s first recording in a quarter century – and a resoundingly beautiful album.
Release date: January 30, 2026 | Loveland Music | Bandcamp
When is an artist’s body of work ever finished? That question popped into my head multiple times while listening to Palle Mikkelborg’s new album Light, his first solo recording in 25 years – and supposedly his last. Does an artist get to define the end of their career, or is that decision snatched from them by the inevitable grasp of time?
Light sees the Danish trumpeter and composer mainly revisiting themes from across his career (with two notable exceptions), reinterpreting his earlier choices through the lens of gathered wisdom and experience. It was recorded in collaboration with guitarist Jakob Bro, who also appears on two songs. While Mikkelborg himself provided the bulk of Light, playing the trumpet, flugelhorn, and piano as well as providing the soundscapes heard across its nine tracks, his decision to go with Bro as a producer has resulted in an aesthetic that’s much more Arve than Aura.
In its austere yet deeply impressionistic approach, Light finds itself in a lineage that’s defined less by the Nordic jazz tradition – already much more sparse than your typical jazz fare – and more by the ripples of minimalism, evoking shades of 20th century classical music and Japanese kankyō ongakū in its boldly delineated yet floating sense of arrangement. That way, it retains a beautiful sense of rumination, which perfectly reflects the themes of remembrance and reemergence connected to the history of this record. Reflecting on his trajectory as a musician over the past 60-odd years, Mikkelborg has found a timeless sound that gently captures his idiosyncrasies as if frozen in time.
Reduced to their bare bones and performed (mostly) by a single person, these nine themes are given a new lease on life, a wisened perspective that comes only from lived experience. They also became a lot more painterly, in my opinion; “Birds”, for example, evokes a lone swallow hanging in a grey winter sky, struggling against the cold and lack of updraft. With only their maker’s hand left to hold them up, Mikkelborg’s songs take on a luminescent hue, shining like a single amber ray of sunset light through thick snowfall.
I’m quite fond of the piano pieces on Light, like “Ambient” or “Spring”. They inhabit the same landscape as many other contemporary classical pieces, and yet there’s something special to their arguably minimalistic presentation, something that reverberates warmly within my body. It’s when he picks up the trumpet or flugelhorn, however, when Mikkelborg becomes the most recognizable; “Wind”, supported by Bro on wind chimes, makes it very clear who it is that’s playing these songs.
The album ends on an interpretation of “Stille, Hjerte, Sol Går Ned” by Danish composer Thomas Laub; a purposeful decision, no doubt, given that the sunset is firmly anchored in its title: ‘Silence, Heart, the Sun goes down’. Here, Mikkelborg is accompanied by Bro on guitar and Helen Davies on harp, while the vocal soundscape was designed by Thomas Li using stems from Vokal Nord. This has to be Light at its most lyrical and fleshed-out, a thoughtful finale to a breathtakingly original recording that draws beauty from austerity in a masterful way.
Light isn’t resignation – it’s acceptance. I’d like to imagine it’s less the sorrowfully wrinkled forehead and more a genuine smile in the face of a life well lived. In shaping his artistic legacy into this new and intoxicating form, Mikkelborg has successfully turned past experience into a well-informed, well-intentioned present, and if that’s not a hopeful message in our current times I don’t know what it. No matter what his path may be from here on out – Light will stand proudly amongst Palle Mikkelborg’s greatest achievements, whether he decides to go on performing music or not.
Header image courtesy of Søren Lynggaard
