Reviews of Odyssey in Studio & in Concert by Terje Rypdal, ECM 2012

I quote from the beautiful essay by Alessandro "Unfolk" Monti published a long time ago here on this blog: " "Odyssey" (ECM 1975) is his masterpiece that ideally closes the first phase of his record career. It’s a Double album (winning that year of the premium of the German criticism) in which the ghost of his music adding new possibilities, but that in the scandalous and inexplicable digital version (both on single cd that in download) omits the most interesting passage "Rolling Stone", a marathon of a side in which the open style of the guitarist  resplendent in all of his beauty and creativeness. Because the reprint in cd has excluded that stupendous passage we will never know (a double cd was the most obvious thing), but purchase the original (still available second-hand) album is the only possibility to have the complete image of that job."
The ECM finally repeair this errors of the past producing a beautiful box with three cd of Odyssey, the first two are the integral edition of the double vinyl and the third one is the 1976 concert unpublished recording entitled Unfinished Hightballs played together with the Swedish Radio Jazz Group.
There is no better thing to listen to the beautiful and dilated atmospheres of the fresh Norwegian sonorous seas in this cold winter! Rypdal is a great guitarist that knows how to express very well himself in long fantastic electric ballads as "Darkness Falls", "Over Birkerot", "Slowly", "Better Off Without You", "Ballade" and of course the mythical one "Rolling Stone" that we can finally listen in digital. Rypdal shows his hendrix psychedelic influences as the love for Coltrane and Albert Ayler using both distortion and volume pedales, his guitar produces long dilated notes or nervous sounds decidedly distant from the jazz and rock guitar models of these times (perhaps made exception for John Mc Laughling and Allan Holdsworth) proposing some innovative solutions that however won't have a lot of succession in the jazz but that  will be adapted later instead by "cosmic guitarists" as Michael Brook.
Very beautiful also the cd live, effective testimony of the intense concert activity developed from the Odyssey Band and of the compositive ambitions by Rypdal that here can also lean on on the Swedish Radio Jazz Group.
At the end we did it, we had to wait  37 years but Odyssey it is finally listening in all of its beauty, excellent the job of remastering as the beautiful minimalist design of the box and the book that it accompanies it with the photos in black and white by Giuseppe Pino and Roberto Masotti. Thanks ECM!