One of the great joys of following Torben Westergaard's creative journey is the surprises found in his work.
One of these comes from the range of styles he masters. Another is how different each album is from the previous ones.
A third form is the conscious depth that exists in the music, a depth that dances and plays with the inviting surface.
Heart Tunes is, says Torben Westergaard, created at the request of a chief physician (there can't be much music that has come about in this way), Per Thorgaard from Aalborg University Hospital.
Apparently, the North Jutland Region is working purposefully and consciously on how the use of music can help people in healing processes, and Per Thorgaard wanted, in Torben's own words, music with 'a little more rhythmic edge' than the current one.
After which he described to Torben some of the phases a patient goes through after heart surgery. Following this guideline, Heart Tunes composed.
The rest of us are happy about that. We first heard the music without knowing the background on which it was created, without knowing that it had a healing purpose.
This, being ignorant, is a good way to listen. You are blank, open, have no expectations or preconceptions.
What struck us was, at the risk of using a worn-out phrase, how good the energy is in this music. How catchy and at the same time deep it is, how the surprises, the music's play with the unexpected, that we talked about above, sneak into the tension between the way in which one has to get up and take a few dance steps, and then at the same time the glimpses and intuitions that one, even when one is like us amateur listeners, suddenly gets of deeper rhythmic and melodic structures.
We recognize Torben Westergaard's love for Latin American music, which he has managed to merge with a sense of something Danish or Scandinavian, so that – here's another little shock – you suddenly lose your bearings and don't know whether you're heading out into the Brazilian rainforest or the Norwegian summer night.
And here is a watermark that can be found in much of – perhaps all? – Torben Westergaard's music. There is a meditative quality, a certain, very difficult to explain, balance. This is music that, even when there is real pressure, maintains a contact inwardly, which, while encouraging one to take part in the world, to dance, to feel the body and fellow human beings, constantly seems to remember or feel towards where creativity comes from.
