Louhivuori / Lønning / Myhr // Nubes

The Finnish-Norwegian trio of drummer Olavi Louhivuori, trumpeter Eivind Lønning, and guitarist Kim Myhr arrive at Nubes with the chemistry of a group that sounds far more established than its origin story suggests. Recorded live at the 2021 We Jazz Festival in Helsinki during their first time playing together, the album turns an unusual trio format into a wide-open field for patient improvisation. Across five cloud-named pieces, Louhivuori, Lønning, and Myhr favor gradual movement over obvious themes, allowing texture, space, and collective instinct to carry the music forward. The long-form “Stratus,” “Cirrus,” and especially the nearly sixteen-minute “Arcus” establish the record’s suspended atmosphere, while the shorter “Fractus” and “Nimbus” tighten that language without sacrificing its searching quality. Louhivuori’s background in groups including Superposition and Linda Fredriksson’s Juniper, Lønning’s history across European improvised music, and Myhr’s work as both guitarist and composer all feed into a music that resists settling into a single jazz vocabulary. What makes Nubes compelling is not virtuosity for its own sake, but the trio’s shared sense of proportion: ideas appear, linger, gather weight, and dissolve before they harden into form. Its cloud imagery suits music that is changing shape, defined more by pressure and motion than fixed outlines. The result is exploratory without sounding academic, atmospheric without becoming passive, and free without losing direction. As a debut, Nubes feels less like a statement of arrival than the documentation of three musicians discovering a language in real time, and realizing almost immediately that it is worth following.