Rob Young, journalist in such alternative music medias as the British magazine 'The Wire', listened through this year's Young Nordic Jazz Comets bands. In his article he found more to the concept of Nordic contemporary jazz, than traditionally meets the eye - or the ear... This year's YNJC showcase is held in Trondheim on the 12th of September. Among the six acts from all the Nordic countries and the Faroe Islands, the Finnish representative Kadi Quartet is also mentioned in Young's article.
Rob Young
Written for the YNJC 2013
www.youngnordicjazzcomets.com
Young Jazz Comets
The journalistic cliché about Nordic music – especially jazz – connects the sound to the landscapes: the glaciers, mountains, forests, the cold and the long dark. This lazy description carries little weight any more, and the reality is more complex. What really characterises Nordic jazz is its incredible cosmopolitanism, its willingness to experiment and reach beyond genre borders, and the blazing heat that fuels its dynamic energies.
After all, we are now floating in a post-jazz world. The era of the great beasts – Jan Garbarek, Terje Rypdal, John Tchicai, Edvard Vesala, Karin Krog – is over. Garbarek – the most widely known figurehead for Norwegian and Scandinavian jazz – increasingly moved away into something approaching religious music with his collaborations with The Hilliard Ensemble: a music that felt increasingly as if it wanted to contemplate eternity and recede as far as possible from the contemporary world. Sidsel Endresen, active since the early 1980s, recently has been working with younger musicians such as Stian Westerhus and Christian Wallumrød, while Swedish free jazz drummer Sven-Åke Johansson, at the age of 70, has been seen in various unusual pan-European improvisation contexts with Gush, Axel Dörner and Werner Dafeldecker.
No matter what kind of music they are making, today’s generation feel empowered to snatch what they want from across the broad spectrum of jazz techniques and fold it into their own material. Could this be the best of times to be a young jazz comet? This is a generation for whom the great jazz masters are not to be feared or imitated, and who don’t treat jazz as a discipline isolated from other music forms. There’s a climate of openness which favours the eclectic and the electric, where jazz perhaps has more of the flavour of the early 70s progressive/heavy rock/jazz crossover in Britain. Pixel are as much an indie band as a jazz ensemble: they make promo videos, and their drummer Jon Audun Baar can drop John Bonham-like grooves into a piece like “Home/Esset”; or Norwegian/Swedish trio The Thing perform albums of punk and grunge rock covers and collaborate with Neneh Cherry. Denmark’s Crunch House chew up jazz, avant garde music and funk, and spit it out in a fabulously multicoloured mess.
If any of these players look back to the past, it’s to the jazz scene of the early 1970s, most notably the Finnish Kadi Quartet and Swedish Casey Moir Band, whose acoustic songswithout-words are reminiscent of the likes of Norma Winstone, Carla Bley, Azimuth, or the early recordings of Sidsel Endresen, Karin Krog or Palle Mikkelborg, like an ECM release circa 1973. What’s most striking about the ‘Young Nordic Jazz Comets’ of 2013 is that few of them play anything remotely like ‘bop’, ‘swing’ or any of the other factors that used to define jazz. Comets blaze brightest when the skies are clear, and there are many of them visible on our horizon right now.