Malene & Christian Malene Mortensen & Christian Sands

• 1 Weight and Sea 04:42
• 2 Forever 05:59
• 3 Go Away Little Boy 05:47
• 4 I Didn't Know What Time it Was 06:23
• 5 Life Is Okay 05:56
• 6 Last Night I Had the Strangest Dream 04:33
• 7 Transient Dreams 06:23
• 8 Reaching for the Sun 06:36
• 9 If You Want the Rainbow 07:15
• Total Runtime 53:34

Info for Malene & Christian

On the album, Malene Mortensen and Christian Sands combine their own lyrics and newly composed music with standards. Mortensen provides insights into her lyrical career: ‘The lyrics are naturally very important to me. They determine which songs I sing. What do they say, and can I identify with them? Can I recognise the emotions they contain and express them in my own interpretation?’ The musical programme covers a broad spectrum and is enriched by the participation of an international team of musicians.

Mortensen reflects: “Lyrics are decisive for me. What do they say, and can I relate to them? Can I find the emotions inside and express them in my own way?”

That emotional honesty is rooted in shared personal experience. Both artists entered the project in the wake of breakups—Sands processing his on an acclaimed 2024 release, EMBRACING DAWN (Jazzwise praised it as “a voyage of recovery from loss, separation, and sadness”), and Mortensen navigating a rupture close to home.

“It can tear your life apart,” she says. “But the music is also about the crises we all face, and the fact that there’s something on the other side. The light returns. Music can take people who are in crisis by the hand.”

Her original song Weight & Sea captures that duality:

“Behind the clouds and the stormy weather / there’s always a clear blue sky … but I can’t fly, and I cannot see the sky.”

The core quartet—Mortensen (vocals), Sands (piano), Thomas Ovesen (bass), and Rasmus Kihlberg (drums)—built the music through an open, organic process, refining it across three concerts before entering the studio. Sands notes the unique Scandinavian jazz tradition, particularly the “big, warm sound” of Danish bassists, praising Ovesen’s foundation and harmonic imagination. Kihlberg, a Swedish drummer celebrated for his melodic sensibility and collaborations with Viktoria Tolstoy and Sylvia Vrethammar, adds both structure and lyricism.

The album also embraces a wider circle of international voices, including American arranger Yuma Sung alongside string players Villads Littauer Bendixen and Lara Biancalana, American trumpeter Benny Benack III, Cuban/Danish Percussionist Eliel Lazo, Hungarian/Danish Tenor saxophonist Gabor Bolla (Hungary/Denmark), and Danish harmonica virtuoso Mathias Heise.

Together, they create a musical universe that balances strength and vulnerability, tradition and renewal—an album that is both a reunion and a new beginning.

Malene Mortensen, vocals
Christian Sands, piano
Thomas Ovesen, bass
Rasmus Kihlberg, drums

Malene Mortensen
is one of the most prominent, Danish jazz vocalist with an extraordinary CV. She has been touring all over the world and she has been recording under her own name since 2003. Malnes’s own compositions is a selection of tunes focusing on everyday challenges, small joys and simple pleasures.

Malene Mortensen released her first album in 2003 at the age of 21. From the very start she worked with great musicians like Niels-Henning Ørsted Pedersen, Alex Riel, Chris Potter, Mike Stern, Avishai Cohen, Christian Sands, Terreon Gully, Chad Wackerman, Adam Rogers and Niels Lan Doky.

The days when she was a promising young talent are long gone; her voice has many colors, her phrasing grows ever more challenging, and her timbre expands with each new release. Malene is an artist of international stature; she has passed the stage of youthful weltschmerz. Today she can encompass and express all the positive things as well – which isn’t always as easy as it sounds. Over the past 15 years – while taking her Master and Soloist degrees from The Rhythmic Conservatory in Copenhagen.

Malene Mortensen has performed on jazz stages in virtually every European country, the Middle East, USA, Australia and large parts of Asia with her own trio, as vocalist with big bands or featured guest in various setups – most recently on tour with Kid Creole & The Coconuts.

Christian Sands
Jazz history is filled with stirring torch songs and ballads — brilliant expressions of suffering after love has gone awry. The jazz record shelf even contains some classic album-long explorations of melancholy. But it’s hard to find precedent in pianist Christian Sands’ new Embracing Dawn, his fifth full-length effort for Mack Avenue Records.

Sands’ LP is nothing less than a cinematic narration of the stages of grief, crafted by one of jazz’s finest young composers. It’s a “breakup record,” to be sure — composed while Sands was experiencing the hurt that only a sudden absence of love can deliver — but it’s so much more. In its thoughtfully assembled nine tracks are a group therapy session, a guide to healing, and an understanding that Sands’ deeply personal angst could apply to any person who has lost a partner, a job, a loved one, an opportunity, the list goes on. In other words, Embracing Dawn is for everyone.

“I actually tried not to write this record,” Sands says with a laugh. “It was painful. I was going through heartbreak, and I didn’t know what to do — and so I decided to put it all into music. But I knew I wasn’t alone in this feeling. So why not create a safe space for people to go when they’re having this feeling, when they’re having these thoughts or questions?”

Embracing Dawn trails 2023’s acclaimed Christmas Stories and 2020’s GRAMMY-nominated Be Water. Following that album’s release, the New York Times commented, “Equipped with a crisp but forceful touch, he seems always to be flowing in new directions, integrating elements of prog rock, gospel and Western classical into a forward-tumbling jazz conception.” Embracing Dawn furthers Sands’ uniquely cultivated jazz language, where agile post-bop meets soulful bluesy tinges and gorgeous swells of strings. Sands’ love of classical orchestration, he explains, is rooted in his lifelong obsession with film.

Ultimately, Sands’ sound and philosophy are informed by two of his most essential mentors: bass maestro Christian McBride, who, as Sands’ longtime employer, taught him the importance of always being yourself; and the late piano legend Dr. Billy Taylor, who stressed how crucial it is to connect jazz to a wide-ranging audience. “I want Embracing Dawn to be something you gravitate toward because of the story,” Sands says

This album contains no booklet.