March 3, 2026
Counting the Flowers - Maria Dybbroe & PO Jørgens
Label: Ninth World Music
Catalog #: NWM055
Location: Denmark
Release Date: February 13, 2026
Media: vinyl or digital files
bandcamp.com - not available
discogs.com entry
Counting the Flowers is the new album by a duet featuring Danish saxophonist Maria Dybbroe and drummer PO Jørgens. The staff of the PPPH are pretty familiar with the saxophone playing of Mariya Dybbroe and have reviewed several albums by groups with her as leader or contributor. The name PO Jørgens was unfamiliar to us. It is not uncommon for us to hear a musician new to our ears, only to discover that the musician has an extensive discography covering decades. Such is the case with PO Jørgens. It induces in us a reflexive defense mechanism to justify our ignorance. In this case, as thoughts of this review incubated in our head, before we put any words on paper, we started thinking about a quote from one of William Parker's books of Conversations. This conversation is with fellow bassist, Mark Helias. We reproduce a short excerpt below.
WP: I heard Ornette Coleman for years before I heard Charlie Parker. And I actually heard Cecil Taylor for years before I really heard Monk. Later on you pick up on it but that's just how it went down.
MH: Yeah, it's interesting. You got the direction but you've got this sort of biased direction, right? It was like you were funneled into ths area but they didn't give you the broad strokes about the whole thing. And that's a discovery I guess we all have to make on our own, sort of integrating all the stuff. And also, the question of what is American culture depends on where you come from, what that is identified as. And I'm discovering all this music that's supposedly not part of my experience; but on the other hand, no music is part of my experience.
Mark Helias, interview by William Parker, December 19, 2012, published in Conversations II: Dialogues and Monologues, edited by Ed Hazell, RogueArt, Paris, France, 2015, p. 17.
As we started preparing a little more for the review, we discovered that PO Jørgens is a pseudonym for Peter Ole Jørgensen. That name didn't ring a bell either. However, the staff of the PPPH are modestly active on discogs.com, keeping track of records, adding releases to the database, and using it as a medium to discover new albums. Through the linking feature of discogs, we discovered that in fact the drumming of Peter Ole Jørgensen was not entirely unknown to us. We had previously heard him on one album, Marches Rewound and Rewritten by Maria Faust Sacrum Facere. Not only that, but we had included Marches Rewound and Rewritten on our list of Top Ten Albums in 2025, just two months earlier! At this point, readers may be thinking that the staff of the PPPH are really kind of clueless. If so, please know that comments of these kinds don't hurt our feelings anymore. We remind ourselves of advice that our younger sister first gave us years ago (which it took a long time for us to appreciate), "It's better to be kind than to be smart."
As chance would have it, Mariya Dybbroe also appeared in the PPPH 2025 Top Ten List, namely on Jeux d'Eau by the Copenhagen Clarinet Choir with Anders Lauge Meldgaard. OMG! Both members of this duo have received the highest musical accolades given by the PPPH staff. To say that our expectations for this album have been raised is an understatement. With this unnecessary preamble behind us, let's get to the music at hand.
Counting the Flowers contains thirteen tracks, titled 1st Flower to 13th Flower, each a duo of percussion and reeds. Several of the tracks are short, about a minute and a half while the longest is just shy of six minutes. The music falls into the vast territory of non-idiomatic improvisation, entering from the direction of jazz.
Our ears are not especially sensitive and easily confounded, especially by birdsong. It's hard for us to recognize an unseen bird by its song in any but the most distinctive cases. This limitation generally extends to music, including the saxophone. We are not very good at identifying a musician by listening to a single track. An exception to this rule is the saxophone playing of Maria Dybbroe, which has a unique sound to our ears, present across the different ensembles in which she plays. However, on "Counting the Flowers", she often casts her stylistic tendencies to the wind. She engages in what we suppose are called extended-techniques to induce the saxophone or the clarinet to generate sounds that are unconventionally musical. Sometimes, a listener hears breath moving through the instrument or brief chirps or percussive bursts. On a few tracks, such as 5th Flower, we are treated to instantly recognizable reeds, that we have come to think of as her signature sound. There are other tracks like 3rd Flower (at the beginning) or 9th Flower (second half) that give just a snippet of this pleasing familiar presence.
The instrumentation used for percussion on Counting the Flowers by PO Jørgens varies considerably from track to track. There are drums, cymbals, hollow metal chimes (13th Flower), maybe a gong (10th Flower), maracas (11th Flower)... Don't quote us on the instrumentation; as we already noted, our ear is unreliable. The rhythm established by the percussion is fluid and natural. None of the tracks are especially regimented. Even in the short pieces the music is not in a hurry to get to the end.
Taken together, Dybbroe & Jørgens combine their inventive musical curiosities with an attentive ear. The result is that neither one leads with the other following. On the contrary, the musical path they travel is one that they mutually create in the moment, jointly exploring as it unfolds before them. If this description sounds like it makes for pleasant listening, then we have captured it reasonably well.
A note on distribution: We couldn't find this release on bandcamp, which is a rarity among music that we listen to, released as it is on independent labels. We did find it on various streaming services. Because we are not streamers, we sought a marketplace where we could download the files to the hard drive. This we found on amazon, where we purchased it as a last resort, since we were not especially inclined to reward Jeff Bezos for his recent $75 million bribe of Melania Trump. Of course, we would much rather purchase the vinyl from an independent record shop or distributor. To our knowledge there is only one vendor on the internet selling the vinyl currently. This seller, located in Denmark, won't ship to the United States. This practice has become increasingly common due to the chaos of Trump's U.S. tariffs, despite both discogs and bandcamp making clear that the tariffs do not apply to recorded media.
Perhaps international music vendors are making a political statement by choosing not to make their music available in the United States, as a form of protest against the woeful state of the American federal government. Perhaps record shops in Denmark don't want to sell us records because our demented grandpa of a president threatened violence if they didn't hand over Greenland! Who can blame them? Still, let us use the end of this review to remind like-minded musical travelers around the world that, while 77,302,580 Americans voted for Trump in 2024, 75,017,613 voted for Kamala. There remains a steadfast and defiant internal opposition to Trump's efforts to destroy the rule of law both inside and outside our national borders. It seems to us that the overlap between listeners of creative music and supporters of our autocratic ruler is very slim. Creative music gives some members of the opposition strength. Vendors that have stopped shipping to the United States should reconsider who they are punishing, if indeed this train of throught is anything more than a paranoid hallucination.
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