Republic of Jazz: Nils Petter Molvær

Showing posts with label Nils Petter Molvær. Show all posts

Thursday, February 1, 2018

Sly & Robbie + Nils Petter Molvær + Eivind Aarset + Vladislav Delay - Nordub (OKEH RECORDS 2018)

On “Nordub”, Grammy-winning Reggae legends Sly & Robbie team up with Norwegian Jazz innovator Nils Petter Molvaer to create a unique sound panorama, spanning the colorful atmospheres of Norwegian Jazz and the energetic grooves of Jamaica. Together with Eivind Aarset on guitars and Vladislav Delay on electronics, this is a band of musical soulmates, beyond all boundaries of genre. During a first tour in 2016 they received worldwide attention for their new project. Yet, the successful as innovative project just came together by sheer good fortune: Even though they had liked each other’s music for years, it was a coincidence that Mark van den Bergh – a friend of Sly & Robbie – ran into Nils Petter Molvaer at Java Jazz Festival.

“I got to know Mark at Java Jazz Festival in 2014,” says Nils Petter Molvaer. I told him that I’d been a fan of Sly & Robbie since the 80s, when they were releasing music with their Reggae band Black Uhuru. I like them for their creative unrest. They are innovators in so many ways, combining Dancehall, Soul, Hip Hop, Reggae and many other influences, and collaborating with such great musicians as Sting, No Doubt, Ben Harper and Carlos Santana. Mark told me that Sly & Robbie were great fans of my music as well, and the idea to work together was born. A few months later, in July 2015, we met at a festival in a little village in France, where we were supposed to play a concert together, though we’d never played together before.”

Robbie Shakespeare remembers: “It was totally crazy. Ever since I first heard Nils’ music in the late 90s, I’ve been fascinated by his atmospheric fusion of styles and his unparalleled trumpet playing. Now we were supposed to play together, though we’d never met before. But when I met Nils for the first time in this little village in France, I immediately liked him. He was cracking jokes and had back pain from the long trip there, just like me, so that created something. It was a great concert, in the end, that enabled us to go far beyond our comfort zones and to discover new ways of creating music.”

After the success of the initial concert in France, the new “band” decided to continue its collaboration and to go on tour in 2016. During the tour several new songs were created and Sly & Robbie, Nils Petter Molvaer, Eivind Aarset and Vladislav Delay were ready to record their first album together in Oslo: “Nordub”.

1 If I Gave You My Love

2 How Long

3 White Scarf in the Mist

4 Strange Bright Crowd

5 Norwegian Sword Fish

6 Was in the Blues

7 European Express

8 Dream Drifter

9 Rock-Stone Noah Bingie

10 Politically KKKorrrekkkttt

11 Neil Five

Sly Dunbar (dr)

Robert Shakespeare (b,p)

Nils Petter Molvaer (t)

Eivind Aarset (g)

Vladislav Delay (elec)

Saturday, December 17, 2016

Nils Petter Molvær - Buoyancy (OKEH RECORDS 2016)

Nils Petter Molvaer is Norwegian.

Nils Petter Molvaer is a trumpeter.

Nils Petter Molvaer is a jazz musician.

However, that explains nothing at all …

… about an artist who never defines himself by what he is at any given time but always by what is beyond the horizon he is aiming for. Let’s try again.

Nils Petter Molvaer is provocative.

Nils Petter Molvaer is unpredictable.

Nils Petter Molvaer is always a world ahead of himself and the rest of humanity.

He stretches himself out at will in time and space, subjecting himself to the new technology of the moment in order to give ever new expression to his timelessly unbridled romanticism. His music is full of radical tenderness, compact vulnerability and robust fragility. Nils Petter Molvaer is a living contradiction, and that is what makes him so human as an artist.

Buoyancy follows on from his last album Switch. With a quartet in which he himself plays trumpet, electronics and effects, Geir Sundstöl contributes a storehouse of exotic guitars and banjos, Jo Berger Myhre works out on bass, keyboards and more guitars and the former Madrugada drummer Erland Dahlen is responsible as one of Europe’s most versatile sound-painters for drums, percussion, xylophone, piano and any kind of everyday object you can imagine, Molvaer sallies forth on a journey through the horizontal, vertical and temporal. All four musicians back up their formidable arsenal of sound-generators with their personal integrity and with an incredible wealth of experience that each has collected independently of the others.

Buoyancy is a band album. More than ever, Molvaer has involved his fellow-music-makers in the concept. Switch brought him closer to Sundstöl and Dahlen, while new boy Jo Berger Myhre had considerable influence on the form the album would take, not least as Molvaer’s co-producer. The fact that it is a band venture doesn’t mean that Molvaer could deny himself a few highly poetic solo passages along the way. But in a wonderful way he succeeds in folding the whole band sound into his trumpet, so even the solo passages come across as collective achievements.

Molvaer’s topography of sounds reaches unforeseen dimensions on Buoyancy. Impressions when diving form the conceptual starting-point of the album as a whole and of each track. Molvaer and his merry men are simultaneously everywhere and nowhere. Each song offers the Norseman new deals between various composites of tradition and avant-garde. More than ever, his sounds are grouped around imagined spaces whose contrary parameters can be best described in terms of silence and chaos. Each piece describes a new primal impulse in the sense of a genuine process of creation. Molvaer gives the listener insight into the perpetual cycle of coming-to-be and passing-away. The music is beautiful and yet full of contradictions. It follows a logic that has far more to do with life than with artistic concepts.

Regardless what direction we approach the music on Buoyancy from, its hypnotic power and intoxicating magic is hard to resist. Seldom if ever has the effect of Molvaer’s music been so psychedelic. Some of the songs come across like swoops past imaginary underwater landscapes, others seem like camera journeys through nocturnal cities. Stoic serenity alternates with a driving pulse. Indonesian tropics evaporate into cyberspace.

The music is full of contrasts, both in microcosmos and in macrocosmos. Buoyancy is a persistent search for the roots of the future in the present – or in the just-now, or the just-after-that.
After the release on September 2nd, 2016 the album positioned on place #9 in the French Jazz Charts.