There is a particular kind of light in Scandinavia in December. It arrives late, disappears early and somehow makes every warm window seem a little more important.
“Desember” by Tore W. Aas feels as though it belongs to exactly that time of day.
The piece appears on the upcoming Klangspot Nu Jazzical Christmas album “In A Nu Jazzical Christmas Mood,” but it does not announce itself as Christmas music in any obvious way. There are no sleigh bells waiting around the corner, no sudden orchestral swell and no melody trying to remind you of a Christmas standard you have already heard a thousand times.
Instead, there is a piano.
And it is enough.
Not a Christmas Carol — a December Mood
The Norwegian title is deliberately simple: Desember. December.
That distinction says quite a lot about the music. Tore W. Aas is not writing about Christmas Day specifically. The piece seems to take in the whole month: the darkness, the anticipation, the quieter evenings and that peculiar mixture of melancholy and warmth that arrives when another year starts drawing to a close.
At around three and a half minutes, the recording has enough time to settle into that mood without overstaying it. The piano is melodic and clearly structured, but the performance never feels rigid. Phrases stretch and breathe. Harmonies are allowed to linger for a moment before the next idea arrives.
There is also more harmonic movement here than in the increasingly common style of ultra-minimal “peaceful piano.” Aas’ background is simply too broad for that. Certain chord changes carry a subtle jazz flavor, others hint at gospel and choral writing, yet none of those influences are pushed to the front.
They are simply part of the vocabulary.
The man behind one of Norway’s great gospel stories
That musical vocabulary has been built over decades.
Tore W. Aas founded the Oslo Gospel Choir in 1988 and became its conductor, composer and producer. Under his leadership, the choir developed into one of Norway’s best-known musical exports and played an important role in bringing contemporary gospel to a much wider Scandinavian audience.
The official Oslo Gospel Choir website gives a sense of the scale of that career: recordings, international concerts, large sacred works and collaborations across gospel and popular music. Norway’s Store norske leksikon also documents the choir’s history and its unusually broad reach beyond a purely church-based audience.
Aas’ work has included far more than choir conducting. He has written songs, larger sacred pieces and arrangements, produced numerous recordings and worked across the border between gospel, pop and contemporary Christian music. He is also connected to music education; NLA University College lists him within its music faculty.
All of that makes “Desember” especially interesting.
This is a musician accustomed to voices — lots of them — choosing to say something with one piano.
You can still hear the choir in the piano
Not literally, of course. But there is something vocal in the way Aas shapes the melody.
The upper register often feels as if it is carrying a sung line, while the lower notes provide the kind of warmth and support that might otherwise come from an ensemble. He gives phrases time to resolve naturally instead of treating the piano as a purely percussive instrument.
That is probably why “Desember” feels fuller than its instrumentation suggests.
It is not a virtuoso piano showcase. Aas never turns the piece into a demonstration of technique. The playing is controlled, lyrical and almost conversational. You get the impression that every chord has been chosen because it needs to be there, not because the arrangement needs filling.
For someone who has spent so many years working with large vocal arrangements, knowing when not to add another layer may be one of the most valuable skills of all.
Christmas has never been foreign territory for Tore W. Aas
Aas also has a long history with Christmas music.
The Oslo Gospel Choir released the successful Christmas album “Tusen Julelys” in the early 1990s, and Tore W. Aas wrote “En stjerne skinner i natt,” a song that has become closely associated with the Norwegian Christmas repertoire. Christmas concerts have remained an important part of the choir’s identity ever since.
That history could easily have led him toward something much more recognizably festive here.
He does the opposite.
“Desember” feels almost private by comparison. It has none of the communal energy of a gospel choir and none of the spectacle of a Christmas concert. It sounds more like what might happen after everyone has left: an empty room, the piano still open, a few lights burning somewhere in the house.
And perhaps that is why the piece works so well.
A Nordic contribution to “In A Nu Jazzical Christmas Mood”
The broader idea behind “In A Nu Jazzical Christmas Mood” is becoming increasingly clear through its individual releases.
The album is not trying to establish one standardized Klangspot Christmas sound. Its more interesting quality is the opposite: different musicians bring their own background into the season.
Lennart Büchner approaches the Irish tradition through Wexford Carol. Florian Sitzmann takes a German hymn and strips it back to piano. Stefania Surace places her own Italian perspective around In the Bleak Midwinter. And Tore W. Aas brings something unmistakably Scandinavian to the collection without needing to quote a traditional carol at all.
“Desember” is winter music because it feels like December.
That is a much more convincing approach than adding bells to an otherwise unrelated composition.
For the quieter hours
The track will naturally sit well in Christmas and winter playlists, but its usefulness goes beyond seasonal listening.
It has enough harmonic interest for someone actually paying attention, while remaining calm enough for reading, writing, dinner, late-evening work or a slow Sunday morning. There is no vocal line competing for attention and no rhythm insisting that the listener follow it.
Yet it never becomes anonymous.
That is the difference between music that happens to work in the background and music written only to be background.
“Desember” belongs to the former.
December, without the wrapping paper
Perhaps the nicest thing about Tore W. Aas’ piece is that it does not try to convince us that December is magical.
It allows the month to be what it is: dark, quiet, sometimes reflective, sometimes warm, with moments of light that matter precisely because there is less of it around.
“Desember” is part of the upcoming “In A Nu Jazzical Christmas Mood” album on Klangspot Nu Jazzical.
It is Christmas music for the point in the evening when the celebration has gone quiet — and the piano suddenly sounds like all you really needed.
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