Ask most jazz listeners over the past 15 years what the jazz sound of Oslo is, and they'd almost certainly pick Jan Garbarek. The Norwegian ambient-sounds improviser created a unique signature out of frozen-landscape music that travels everywhere very slowly, and sometimes hardly seems to be travelling at all.
But to a new generation of jazz listeners, the Oslo sound means just the opposite: club-culture rhythms, electronic beats, drum machines and synths, with maybe a little high-energy free sax. Bugge Wesseltoft, pianist, composer, and founder of the Jazzlands record label (the focus of Thursday's three-act gig) is now the most influential Norwegian musician of his generation emerging from a jazz background, and the press has swooned over him.
Like most of his predecessors in this cross-border activity, Wesseltoft's challenge is to balance the unpredictability and melodic waywardness of the best jazz against the button-pressing certainties of a repeating groove. As a disciple of Chick Corea and Joe Zawinul, he's pretty good at it.
Norwegian drummer and composer Auden Kleive kicked things in, with the most structurally and sonically challenging music of the night that pleased the improv fans and baffled the clubbers. Then came Wesseltoft with a mix of some old conceptions of Chick Corea's, Joe Zawinul's and 1970s Miles Davis. These were played against attractive and compulsive interplay between live drumming and machine percussion, plus some powerful and surprisingly off-the-wall sax-playing, as if Albert Ayler had been reincarnated in a techno world.
The possibilities for drummers in this music - always obliged to be reactive to others, now intriguingly offered the chance to be reactive to a counterpoint of beats as well as melody - have become one of its most fascinating aspects. Clipped, fragmentary phrases of repeating melody bounced off the chattery undercurrents, sound effects like panpipes or hooting owls swept around it, and some passages of sustained climaxes were as exciting as anything jazz fusion has produced.
Singer Beate Lech and bassist Marius Reksjo (collectively they're Beady Belle) wound up the show with a blend of drum'n'bass and powerful, pop-soul vocals. Lech's range is wide and her timing sharp, so her variation of phrasing against the grooves made the trance-like loop of the music as unpredictable as it could be. Maybe that isn't saying all that much, but the Oslo underground certainly has energy and a fresh angle on crossover on its side. Its influence is bound to grow.
