Pal Thowson in Carnival, 1981, and Sympathy, 1983

Carnival continues the same wonderful light and smooth fusion style of its predecessor Surprise but on Sympathy he went all out with the commercial songs and therefore holds very little of interest for us here.

I posted both anyways.

The music is not quite as brilliant on Sympathy, I guess predictably (since crazy complex and creative originality peaked for fusion in the mid seventies time frame), the full credits can be found on this page.

Shockingly the album starts off with Gino Vanelli's Brother to Brother composition, recall I raved about his music way back here, long long ago in 2021, and to be honest I still really love his stuff, he was as underrated as they get. He has lost Eberson (sadly) and bassist Arild Andersen, Hakon Graf only contributed one track, but the final one is by our beloved Palle Mikkelborg, it's called It was Just a Dream and it's almost as nice as the closer for the preceding one:

The replacement composer for Eberson is trumpeter Fred Noddelund, who in contrast to the fusion plays a chamber style of music. You get a sense of that here on the Sundown track he wrote:

Hakon's track called Highway I'm pretty sure appeared on one of his solo LPs:

Anyways, you get the idea. It's a mixed bag. Not so the next album from 1983, Sympathy, that one is much more monolithic, cohesive, being just a bag of rocks for me.  Despite it again featured Eberson and Hakon Graf.