Released on the vintage Copenhagen-based label Storyville, Carsten Dahl’s new recording pays tribute to an influential figure in contemporary European jazz: the 84-year-old Danish trumpet/flugelhornist Palle Mikkelborg. The 57-year-old esteemed jazz pianist-leader describes Mikkelborg as someone who has been on a lifetime journey seeking, “the sublime sound of nothing in everything and the sound of everything in nothing.”

Dahl illustrates this paradox with a sombre yet luminously ambient, less-is-more collection of widescreen pieces inspired by Mikkelborg’s large ensemble writing as leader. Dahl’s instrumental sound palette here has some similarities to Mikkelborg’s most celebrated work: the spiritually-charged album release in 1989 titled Aura, a tribute to his idol Miles Davis that was recorded by the master himself the same year.

But In the Middle of Nothing treads an entirely different musical path. Along the way Ligeti-like strings make eerily sustained overtones and tinkling antique bells add tension until a more harmonically consonant string arrangement emerges; an adult and children’s choir (from the BBC no less) join in and Mikkelborg contributes his signature blurry, intimately breathy, muted flugel/trumpet with melodic fragments that are poignant in their aching melancholy, although his overall contribution to the recording, as with his playing, is minimal.

While Dahl’s harmonium creates a church-y backdrop to Fredrik Lundin’s avant-jazz, howling sax improv, a warm ray of light peaks out from the darkness for the closing redemptive ‘Ton 68’as Celina Sørine Dahl’s wordless Nordic folk music-like vocal and choir merge with Dahl’s delicate single line of piano and Mikkelborg’s succinct trumpet signs off a coherent, elegantly nuanced work. Its slow-moving, still ambience and infinitely sustained lines will nevertheless make it something of an acquired taste.