Dare if you will

Music can demand that one dares to take the plunge and just throw oneself right into it, that one gives it more than one chance. But surely most people will want to do that with Aura? The bonus is that new worlds are suddenly exposed which you never knew existed.

Composer and trumpeter Palle Mikkelborg's Aura is a complex work. A concept album which can be difficult to understand. It is performed by some of the very finest jazz musicians from Denmark and abroad, but is it actually jazz in the traditional meaning of that world?

One colour, one note
The concept of Aura is based on an idea which Mikkelborg devised for one of jazz's greatest musicians and recorded along with him, the style- setting American trumpeter Miles Davis, who died in 1991 at the age of 65. In his time that charismatic figure inspired many musicians from drum'n'bass to jazz, among them Palle Mikkelborg. And the Dane thought he could see different colours in Miles Davis's aura. 

Mikkelborg has constructed Aura using these colours, transforming at the same time the letters in Miles Davis's name to notes. The work's nine numbers are played in different keys, each one with its special colour as title. Does that sound a bit spiritual? Mikkelborg is both a spiritual and philosophically-inclined musician. He calls music a journey of discovery in search of peace of mind.

Advanced mix
Aura contains compositional music without genre, in which stirring landscapes of sound and virtuoso writing intermingle with each other far out on the edge of the jazz spectrum. Aura comprises an advanced mix with elements of funk, rock, fusion, classical music and much, much more than all that, presented in a form which is totally open for interpretation. If you care to dare. Because although the numbers have titles like "White", "Orange", "Green" and so on, the idea surely can't be that you should envisage those colours while you are listening to the music? 

Peter Elsnab is a music journalist and Jesper Nykjaer Knudsen a culture journalist.