Before Rypdal was a jazz guitarist, he was playing in Norwegian pop and rock bands, and that background never fully left him. He came to jazz sideways, through curiosity more than orthodoxy, and that outsider angle is basically the whole story. When he started working with Jan Garbarek and then Keith Jarrett on early ECM sessions in the late 1960s and early 1970s, he wasn't trying to play bebop with distortion — he was after something else entirely, something slower and more atmospheric, where a single sustained note could carry as much weight as a whole chord sequence.

His records for ECM — Whenever I Seem to Be Far Away (1974), Odyssey (1975), Waves (1978) — established a sound that's become closely associated with the label but is really all his own. He plays with a lot of reverb and sustain, bending notes into long arcs, and the music often feels less improvised in the traditional jazz sense and more like it's being sculpted in real time. There's a darkness to it, but not a brooding or self-conscious darkness — more like the sky in late November, which in Norway isn't a metaphor, it's just what you see when you look outside.

What makes Rypdal genuinely distinct is how little he sounds like anyone else on the instrument. Jazz guitarists tend to cluster around certain touchstones — Wes Montgomery, Jim Hall, Pat Metheny — but Rypdal bypasses all of that. He owes more to Jimi Hendrix and to European classical music than to anything coming out of the American jazz tradition, and the result is a guitar voice that doesn't fit neatly into any existing conversation. His solos don't swing in any conventional sense, but they have their own internal momentum, a logic that reveals itself slowly if you give it time.

He also went through a hard rock-adjacent phase that some fans skip over but is worth hearing. The group Odyssey, which featured a harder, more electric sound, showed he wasn't interested in sitting still or making the same record twice. And throughout his career he worked on orchestral compositions alongside his band work, which isn't surprising once you hear how orchestrally he tends to think on guitar — everything about the way he voices sounds suggests someone who's always hearing the bigger picture.

If you're coming to Rypdal for the first time, the ECM records from the 1970s are the right starting point. Put on Waves (1978) in a quiet room and just let it go — don't wait for a melody to grab you or a groove to kick in. His music operates on a different clock. Once you're tuned to it, the earlier and later records open up pretty quickly, and you'll probably start wondering why more guitarists ever bothered doing anything else.