If you've only ever heard trumpet played the American way — bright, brassy, full of attack — Arve Henriksen will mess with your expectations. He plays soft. He plays airy. Sometimes you can barely tell it's a trumpet at all, and that's by design. Henriksen spent years studying the shakuhachi, the Japanese bamboo flute, and he brought that breathy, almost vocal quality back to his own instrument. It's a sound closer to Jon Hassell's trumpet experiments than to anything coming out of a bebop lineage, and once you hear it you don't forget it.

He came up in Trondheim and got his real education in the collective improv group Supersilent, alongside Helge Sten and Ståle Storløkken, making records that had almost nothing to do with conventional jazz structure — long, slow-building, electronic-tinged pieces that felt more like weather systems than songs. That group taught him patience, and it shows in his solo work, which rarely rushes anywhere.

On his own albums for Rune Grammofon, starting with Sakuteiki (2001) and continuing through Chiaroscuro (2004) and Strjon (2007), Henriksen built a sound world that mixes trumpet, voice, electronics, and silence into something closer to ambient music than straight jazz. He actually sings on a lot of these records, in a high, almost boyish register that blends right into the trumpet lines — sometimes you genuinely can't tell which is which. It's a trick, but it's a good one, and it gives his music an intimacy that's rare in instrumental records.

He's not a flashy player and he's never tried to be. You won't find him burning through changes or showing off range. What he's after is tone and texture, the kind of sound that works as well on a film score as it does on a jazz stage, which is probably why he's ended up collaborating with everyone from David Sylvian to Norwegian folk singers to electronic producers. If you want jazz trumpet that sounds like fire, look elsewhere. If you want it to sound like fog rolling over a fjord, Henriksen is your guy.