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Vossa Jazz Going Strong and Poetic at 50
Courtesy Josef Woodard
By this point (at 50), the Vossa Jazz festival is going strong, drawing large crowds and affirming its reputation as a go- to spot to hear some of the finest artists in the hearty Norwegian jazz scene... Given the milestone year and attendant waves of nostalgia, the program consciously reprised historical moments while embracing the evolving moment.
Voss, Norway
March 31-April 2, 2023
Origin stories in the still-young-ish wild frontier of jazz festival culture can be fascinating case studies in feisty pioneer spirit. Take the Western Norwegian Vossa Jazz Festival, an important stop in the storied Norwegian festival circuit, which celebrated its ripe old 50th birthday this year. Its humble origins date back to the dreaming and scheming of twentysomething jazz enthusiasts from Voss, Lars Mossefinn, Arild W?rness and Asle Haaland, who had first channeled their jazz passion into forming a local jazz club. After visiting the Montreux festival in Switzerland, they had a light-bulb moment: just as Montreux is a tourist destination on a lake, Lake Geneva, Voss was a beautiful small town renowned for skiing and other sports, on also on a lake, albeit the more modestly-scaled Voss Lake. Voila, the seed of a great festival in an intimate setting was born.
Circa 2023, the festival is now deep into a long chapter of renovation and re-galvanized identity, thanks to the guidance of the indomitable and charming director Trude Storheim. Storheim took the helm in 2017, following a downturn in the festival's fates which found the organization near bankruptcy. By this point, the festival is going strong, drawing large crowds and affirming its reputation as a go-to spot to hear some of the finest artists in the hearty Norwegian jazz scene. This year, the springtime ritual featured a stronger than usual list of Nordic luminaries, including
Nils Petter Molvaer
trumpetb.1960
Mathias Eick
trumpetb.1979
Trygve Seim
saxophone
Paal Nilssen-Love
drumsb.1974
Mats Gustafsson
woodwindsb.1964
Other shows of note and otherwise memory-clingers this year included the rousingly fine Roma-meets-Nordic project Angrusori, featuring the irrepressible
Iva Bittova
vocals
Soren Kjaergaard
piano
Peter Bruun
drumsGiven the milestone year and attendant waves of nostalgia, the program consciously reprised historical moments while embracing the evolving moment. This was particularly true in terms of its well-known commissioning program, and the annual high-profile Tingingverket commissioning tradition. As a way of highlighting the impressive lineage of custom-made Tingingverket projects over the decades, we heard highlight examples of this special evening-long commission lineage. From 1990, noted bassist
Arild Anderson
bass, acousticProudly presented as the opening event of festival @ 50, Khmer managed the feat of being a first-and-best case scenario of the fest. Khmer was, and remains, a landmark in a personalized type of electro-cosmic jazz rising out of the ashes of fusion and reconsidering '70s electric voodoo Miles music with Nordic atmospheres in the ever-shifting margins. Despite its '90s vintage, the music translates powerfully to the modern day and the modern ear, enhanced by huge advances in digital music technology, expanding textual palettes. Electronician and live sampler
Jan Bang
live samplingb.1968
Eivind Aarset
guitarLater that Friday night, over in the multi-stage and lakeside Park Hotel compound, various permutations of rhythmic and sonic convergences challenged the senses. The Large Unit's playfully elastic title aptly captures drummer-leader Nilssen-Love's ensemble scale, interweaving of raucous free play and structures, not to mention ironic suggestions of machinery and sex. Here, though, we caught the Unit in its "EthioBraz" mode, in taut collusion with the powerful Ethiopian music/dance group Fendika!, Nilssen-Love appeared at Vossa Jazz last year, in part, as a late-night DJ, with a strongly African playlist. With the EthioBraz project, the synthesis of Norwegian out-leaning jazz and Ethiopian seductions made for a cathartic furnace of positive cross-cultural energy. At midnight in the tight club quarters of the Park Pentagon, it was high time for/with The End. Headbanger jazz doesn't get much more potent or sternum-rattling than with the sound force of this fascinating, feverish but also musicality-blessed unit, charged by the twin reckoning force of bari saxophonist Gustafsson and tenor saxophonist
Kjetil Møster
saxophone, tenor
Sofia Jernberg
vocalsFemale vocalists always have a strong place in Vossa Jazz programming, and this year's selection was notably and happily diverse. Popular pop singer " data-original-title="" title="">Stephane Brunello closed the fest in the arena big house, while in the intimate venue of the Osasalen (in Voss' widely-respected Ole Bull Folk Music School), Langeland's poetic and altogether moving early afternoon set was the festival's most prime example of the natural Norwegian tendency for fluidly blending its deep folk tradition with jazz elements. While she held down the epicenter, as vocalist and player of the zither-like Finnish kantele, her work was deftly tethered to contributions from a stellar band—saxophonist Trygme Seim in his yearningly lyrical mode, trumpeter Eick waxing melodic and a flexible rhythm section of bassist
Mats Eilertsen
bassb.1975
Thomas Strønen
drumsb.1972
A rare American presence this year came in the form of the underrated wonder that is " data-original-title="" title="">Martha Wainwright, who, although with little-or-no direct connection to jazz, per se, registered mightily on the pure terms of artistic expression and dramatic stage presence. The stage in question: the mystical space of the city's 13th century church, the Vangskyrkja. As for her own historical backdrop, we sense the deep familial musical roots of her parents—Kate McGarrigle and
Loudon Wainwright III
vocalsb.1946
Rufus Wainwright
vocalsb.1973
Tom Waits
piano and vocalsb.1949
Jazz met and got along with pop elements in other important corners of the program. Intriguing and genre-fluid singer-songwriter " data-original-title="" title="">Mariam Wallentin dazzled in unexpected ways and with a musical essence all her own, expanded into arrangements for the nine-piece group of fine Western Norwegian musicians, dubbed the Vestnorsk Jazzensemble. Echoes of such mold-breaking vocalist outliers as
Annette Peacock
vocals
Gabor Szabo
guitar1936 - 1982
Larry Carlton
guitarb.1948
Swingle Singers
band / ensemble / orchestrab.1962
Modern Jazz Quartet
band / ensemble / orchestrab.1952
Enter the Sheepshead Moment. After each year's Tingingverket event, a selective crowd of VIPs, toasted artists and stray-dog journalists gather for the ceremonial Hardanger region-specific smalahove dinner, consisting of a half a boiled sheep's head on a plate. The animal's intact eyeball seems to stare at the diner, both in challenge and—we think, hopefully—in appreciation for not letting this sacrificed creature's otherwise discarded parts go to waste. We—the partakers, at least—savor the fare and throw back a thimble of aquavit after bellowing "sk?l!"
At this milestone 50th anniversary affair, the collective sense of sk?l in this town felt especially hearty and well-deserved.
Tags
Festivals Talking
Nils Petter Molvaer
Josef Woodard
Norway
Trude Storheim
Matthias Eik
Trygve Seim
Sinekka Langeland
Paal Nilssen-Love's Large Unit
Mats Gustafson's
The End
Oddrun Lilja
Angrusori
Iva Bittova
S?ren Kj?rgaard
Jonas Westergaard
Peter Bruun
Arild Anderson's
Jan Bang
Eivind Aarset's
Fendika!
Kjetil M?ster
Sofia Jernberg
Ane Brun
Mats Eilertson
Thomas Str?nen
Martha Wainwright
Kate McGarrigle
Loudon Wainwright III
Rufus Wainwright
Tom Waits'
Mariam Wallentin
Annette Peacock
Adrienne Lenker
Gabor Szabo
Larry Carlton
MJQ
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