We meet for the first concert day of the season at Nasjonal jazzscene, club manager Larsen says a few words about the program this season, while it is buzzing in this room that has housed one of Europe’s by far the best jazz clubs for several years.
Will the club be able to maintain this high level? Hope is hanging by the thread.
New and old new music
We have spent many hours in this venue, which was fairly shabby when Nasjonal jazzscene took over here almost 18 years ago, but which with a few moves was transformed from a gaudy variety theater to a jazz club. Nasjonal jazzscene at Victoria will soon have its official day! Incredible. Because sometimes it can seem like yesterday that we stood outside the entrance to Belleville and looked over to Rockefeller.
It is probably approaching that we have overheard a thousand concerts here in this room over the years, from the very best of the best, to the wretchedness of the wretched. The entire spectrum of artists and their music has filled this room with euphoria, and sometimes with dissonance.
I can count on one or two hands the times I have walked away from here and thought that this – we could have done without that. But I have no number of the times I have walked away from here, uplifted, enriched, after a mentality-expanding experience, high on qualitatively good music, and thinking, it is certainly not the case that the world was better before.
There are two aspects that make the last group of hours successful: There is the experience of live music performed by communicating musicians, and there is the equal community in which this experience takes place.
Great and rich musical experiences do not come by themselves, but they are available to anyone who is willing to listen. And maybe you will also discover new music that gives you a new understanding of what music is? Happiness is knowing that you are never, and never will be, unlearned as a listener.
Many claim that the music we experienced, the music that gripped us, the music that lifted you and me, in our formative years as youth and young adults, will never leave us. That this music will forever be a benchmark against which encounters with new music will be measured. And against which it will always fall short. Possible, possible. For some.
But I say it again, it is starting to be a few decades since I got the Finnerud trio right in my face as a 16-year-old, it is a long time since I sat at the foot of Charles Mingus’ bass and bathed in his sweat. It seems an infinite time since I and many others were overjoyed by Stockhausen’s music performance at Høvikodden.
The discovery and introduction of Johann Sebastian’s unique universe. But it has been at least as many decades since my grandfather’s rakfisk arrived in the family before every Christmas, and the delicious aroma tickled my nose every Christmas Eve. The Pultost I brought home from the farm after the summer holidays as well.
Although I acknowledge that the experience of no rakfisk, no rakfisk, can reach the heights that I imagine I reached back then, I know that when I get my hands on marflo-colored, properly shaved wild fish today, the reality is probably that this fish is as flavorful in its creamy substance as the rakfisk of my childhood. Without depriving my grandfather of the honor bestowed upon him of having made the world’s best rakfisk, every single year from the time I was six or seven until I was a teenager. And Charles Mingus is like my grandfather’s rakfisk. Maybe it is Stockhausen who is the rakfisk?
The nostalgia of a rakfisk
Nostalgia lives on a fiction. A longing for the past is not a longing for what was. What you have recreated as what was then is a thick stratum of false memories, refurbished and polished memories. What you imagine has never existed anywhere else but inside your own head.
I also know this: We live at a time when the vast majority of people in our country are far better off than Norwegians have ever been in any previous historical phase. But we have lost touch with the struggle, with the energy that was required to transport us here. We have naturalized what is in a historical sense completely unique, something completely distinctive. It is not self-evident. The most dangerous thing that happens is when too many take it for granted.
Ever since sometime in the mid-19th century, when the Norwegian economy established itself as one of Europe’s rich economies, and where it has been placed later, we who have grown up in our part of the world have lived with a belief, bordering on certainty, that the future for ourselves and our children will be better than the past. We have experienced it as living on a knife edge – between a past we do not want back and a better, brighter future.
Over the past three or four decades, we have moved into a time where we see that what we have achieved after several generations of political struggle is in danger.
An equal society can never be taken for granted. A society in harmony with the rules and limits of nature is not a given. Nothing is as destructive as a general experience of the knife’s edge becoming an egg where what follows is downhill from what was, especially when we as a society allow an elite to do whatever it wants to a greater and greater extent.
Every schoolgirl should know
A capitalist economy like the Norwegian one is founded on a permission to seek to create profit in a market. Access to this market is not something given by nature or by God. Seeking profit is not a right, it is a concession, it is something that is given up by the community to entrepreneurs through institution-building. And like all permissions, this entails duties.
The community gives up a right because it is for the common good in the long term. We divide the pie lopsidedly by giving those who create something new the opportunity to make money from it, and thereby appropriate a larger share of the socio-economic value of the innovation. We do not do it because it is the capitalist’s right, or because it is ‘fair’.
We do it for exactly the opposite reasons. We do it because it allows us to bake a bigger pie tomorrow, so that everyone is better off in the long run. In return, we as a community expect that whoever makes a profit from this will respond to the social obligation they have. That is the essence of socio-economic theory in a system based on private property rights. That is the essence of the social contract that entrepreneurs enter into with the community.
The more equal the society, the more efficient this socio-economic value creation becomes. By giving everyone the opportunity to get into a position to create something new, we are not just spreading the income.
From pure statistics – and something called Fisher’s fundamental theorem – it is obvious that innovators are on average better adapted to the economic, social and institutional framework conditions, and innovations are qualitatively better adapted to these. This should be one of the insights that Gregory Bateson characterized as what “every schoolboy knows”.
But it is unfortunately an insight that far too few acknowledge, even if it only requires a simple description for its content and implications to be made obvious and easy to understand. But when we see that there is a great danger that tomorrow’s pie may be smaller, and that it will be even more unevenly distributed, we are moving towards a completely different society than the one our great-grandparents and their predecessors fought for.
We can see today that the support for our democratic societies, in a striving for social, cultural and political equality, is dependent on a few critical factors: A general belief that here and now we are sitting on an egg where what follows is better, that there is broad and general insight and knowledge about society and its physical and social conditions, an empathetic approach among all of us to the life world of others, and that we bring with us a cultural openness. What is different is not a danger, it is an opportunity.
And the recognition of one more thing: The ideal we strive for is not financial earnings, it is not all the things that money can buy. Because as someone once said, “tell me that you want the kind of things that money just can’t buy. Money can’t buy me love”. The important ideal we strive for is community and self-realization, for ourselves and for everyone else.
It is all that no money can value, all that is not captured by my colleagues economists’ socio-economic schemes and lists that are our societal goals. The truth about a good life lives in a social community, in a culture that promotes a great deal of variation and a large space for individual desires and goals. It is not worse.
The meaning of life is culture – the culture of life gives meaning
The meaning of life is not in the size of your bank account, the cottage by the sea or the boastful boasting of private property. The meaning of life lies in the encounter with the other, the encounter with those who are different from you, in those encounters where you are changed. The good life is when you think in the evening, today I am different from yesterday. And that has happened because I met the other. The meaning of life is a cultural meaning.
The good society is a society where everyone has an equal opportunity to realize themselves and the community, according to their own desires, talents and conditions. A society where we give the other the space, tools and opportunity to realize themselves. The good society is a society where the primary goal for each of us is the other’s self-realization. That we develop together towards something better. This is how we can regain faith in our own future and that of our descendants. So simple, and so difficult!
Such thoughts are evoked by the encounter with a large social community at the opening of a new season of great cultural experiences. What I will encounter, I do not know, beyond club manager Larsen’s brief presentation of some of the names that will come to this stage in the coming months.
But this I do know: When the season draws to a close towards the summer of 2026, I will be mentally and culturally in a different place than I am today. A better place because of encounters with others, with new cultural experiences, and new thoughts, new insights, which this has triggered. Hopefully also a better place for what is the tool and subservient of this development: politics and economics. Neither of the two is an end in itself, they are only appropriate tools for realizing something greater than themselves. The task and goal of social policy are cultural, that is what every schoolboy and -girl should know! Then we can together lift each other up, give each other the opportunity to find our own path to what gives your and my life meaning and rich content for you, for me. It is not more difficult. Life is always a work in progress!
Heartily present, the joy is great, and thoughts fly like busy meat titmice in the winter sun around the tallow balls. There are two tallow balls on stage today: Nils Petter Molvær with trumpet and responsive electronics, and Daniel Herskedal on bass trumpet and tuba. It is easy to feel that there is a very responsive audience that welcomes them. Two master musicians of their own generation, Herskedal a good twenty years younger than Molvær, who in their own way have contributed in long musical lives to our having experienced a historically unique and distinctive golden age in Norwegian improvised music through the 35 years that have passed since 1990, the year Frederik de Klerk released Nelson Mandela from Victor Verster prison where Madiba had been imprisoned for the last year. The year before Miles dropped the Harmon bribe for the last time.
NRK’s Jazzeventyret “forgot” this story in its eagerness to highlight a selective history of jazz in Norway after 1965-70. The history of Norwegian jazz since 1960 still remains to be conveyed in a reflective way. And in that history both Molvær’s and Herskedal’s names should shine, individually and together. But as one of my sidekicks also humorously replies, this is also a historical collaboration where a North-Møring and a South-Møring collaborate on a common project. But it was like playing with myths and prejudices, we don’t do that here. Or rather, we do. Playing is life’s most important and useful activity. The goal of life is playing.
Two and two become one
The two played two concerts in Prague on Thursday, and today have come to the National Jazz Scene to play together on a Norwegian stage, together and as a duo, for the very first time. It is beautiful, languidly beautiful tones.
Molvær’s processed, as well as direct, tonal spectrum in the trumpet is unique. Since Masqualero, Labyrinter/Khmer and everything else he has created throughout a long musical life are brought to mind by these sound profiles.
Once upon a time it was Jazid and Blå who helped to rule, yes, almost created, the ground in Scandinavia as a workshop for new improvised music – or now jazz music if you will – today it is Victoria. Long lines, long tones.
Herskedal’s bass trumpet in B♭ (just ask) is velvety, with meandering lines, live slowly and enjoy every moment. There is no rush. We don’t need to storm up every mountain peak like the mountain goat. The minimalists in New York got it, maybe it’s time we did. Organic growth and movement, singing, and languishing. Compassionate music. Living music. Transcending music. Herskedal’s four-valve tuba fills the room with infrasound – a deep F? – then the bottle-lined one dances along in eager eagerness and dawning joy.
Is one and one still greater than two? The electronic background sings along like a tambura, creating space and responding with frequency and length, with height, weight and heaviness. If you’ve heard North Indian music, you’ve definitely heard a tambura. A swinging three over four dances through the room, where the lines replace each other as in a meander through a wide, swaying U-valley. The river finds new courses and backwaters remain as puddles in the landscape, while they sing their last notes to the sky.
Right or wrong, it’s all the notes!
The duo creates beautiful music, but maybe it’s all in the most beautiful way? I sat there at times and missed the scrubbing in my ears. The resistance, the rasp, that which also arouses objections. Before you let yourself be convinced by what comes after, that yes, that was the way it was, that was the way it was supposed to be. “There are no wrong notes in jazz,” Thelonious Monk once said, “only notes in the wrong places.” Miles added, “it’s the note you play afterwards that makes it right or wrong.” There are right wrong notes, and wrong right notes. But are there any wrong wrong notes? The one who only does everything right, who does everything by the book, … he doesn’t take enough chances.
This is music like pieces on a wall. Beauty is created in the variation between the parts, the ambiguity lies in the whole. It is the diversity that is beautiful. Monocultures are never beautiful. But even more, they are doomed to die. Like music, all culture, all art never stands still. The essence of culture is in the multiculture. Search for the movement, search for what creates change. Change and variation are what create the new future. But not because it is only something new. Because it uses the traditions. Complements them, changes them, turns them on their head. What if I do this? Or that? Culture and music are like Askeladden on his way to the princess that no one could target. “I found, I found,” he said, picking up a dead magpie, a worn-out shoe sole, a wicker tensioner and whatever it was. Everything can be used, everything can be turned into something new.
So when the duo Herskedal-Molvær ends with Eden Ahbez’s “Nature Boy,” a gem of a song, everything falls into place. You can never go wrong with “Nature Boy,” you can never go wrong with “Nature Boy.” It is a theme that awakens so many memories of great music. The two united Moors deliver a melting, piercingly beautiful version that creates a community, a wonderful palaver around an imaginary and experienced campfire. United music of Möre.
Yes, it is in the common social meeting between curious souls that the truth about life is found! As in Molvær and Herskedal. Take care of this community, grow with it. Then we will see each other again in meetings around singing campfires with good music. Will you bring your horn next time?
So maybe, after all, 2026 won’t be so bad? We’ll let the rope hang a little longer.
