Scandinavian top with American assistance. Creative and beautiful Danish

Your envoy has been silenced because I have criticized Molde football club, but also a lot of statements of support, after the “collision” between the tribute concert/football match at “Røkke-løkka” on Monday, at the same time that the opening concert for the festival went off the rails.

But I take the criticism, but I still stand by my position. It was exceptionally unmusical.

Chatty success

Today I, and many with me, started the day with an artist talk at the Festival Academy, where master of ceremonies Audun Vinger interviewed/conversed with this year’s Artist in Residence, Esperanza Spalding. An hour where Vinger hardly got a word in, but where Spalding talked a lot and excitingly about her Norwegian origins.

The Festival Academy, under Vinger’s leadership, has become a kind of highlight of the first “active” hours at the festival every day. And if there are two things the festival should really take care of, it is this tradition. A brilliant opening to the day.

Creative and beautiful Danish / Swedish / American meeting

Musically, I started the day at Teatret Vårt with Michala Østergaard Trio. It is enough that Østergaard’s name characterizes the trio name, that it is the drummer Michala Østergaard-Nielsen (main picture) who composes most of the music for this trio, which also consists of the extremely fine pianist Marilyn Crispell and the Swedish bassist Thommy Andersson.

I could tell you a lot about Østergaard-Nielsen and Andersson, having heard them in a number of contexts during the years I lived in Copenhagen, and where they were often heard at, among others, Jazzcup (Andersson) and Koncertkirken (Østergaard-Nielsen). Andersson is a creative bassist who can be inserted into almost any context, and he works excellently, while Østergaard-Nielsen has more specific references about what she wants to do. And the collaboration with the American pianist Marilyn Crispell is, I think, the dream collaboration for her.

Marilyn Crispell is an American pianist who has collaborated with “everyone” in the modern jazz scene. She has released a slew of albums under her own name, where she has collaborated with, among others, Billy Bang, Peter Kowald, Didier Petit, Reggie Workman, Anthony Braxton, Paul Motian, Oliver Lake, Barry Guy, Fred Anderson, Joseph Jarman, Gary and Anette Peacock, Joe Fomnda and a bunch of others. She has also collaborated with musicians such as Lotte Anker and Marilyn Mazur, Mats Gustavsson and Raymond Strid (with Barry Guy), Andrrs Jormin, Henry Kaiser, Steve Lacy, Joelle Leandre, Gunhild Seim and David Rothenberg, Wadada Leo Smith and a number of others. She has also made a number of solo albums, all of which are highly recommended.

In 2025, the Michala Østergaard Trio made the recording The Cave, from which much of the setlist for today’s concert was taken. But we also got earlier and newer compositions by Østergaard-Nielsen where everything, and I mean everything, worked perfectly.

Marilyn Crispell is a gifted pianist within the “modern” jazz, who is extremely creative in her playing, and who creates incredibly beautiful improvisations over the written themes. Østergaard-Nielsen is a drummer who plays loosely and nicely, and who pushes the music forward in an excellent way, and Andersson shows off many new sides to her playing in this setting, which makes this an incredibly tight and nice trio. A good example of Crispell’s excellent piano playing was the solo on the fine song “The Path”, where she ended almost exactly where Keith Jarrett “calms down”, before he launches into his insanely beautiful and lyrical theme on The Köln Concert. And this is exactly where we find Crispell. She draws in elements from the entire recent jazz history, and creates beautiful turns and inputs that it must be a dream for a “comp” to follow.

But Andersson and Østergaard-Nielsen are not an ordinary comp. They sit close to the pianist, challenge, spice up and help make the whole thing tight and cohesive, which almost only trios that have played together for many years manage to create.

Having this concert as the opening act at a “midweek” concert in Moldejazz was just lovely!

Exquisite “loft jazz” from Bergen

There is no doubt that an incredible amount of exciting things are happening on the, somewhat, alternative jazz scene in Bergen. In the environment around the concert series “Tedans” in the middle of the city center, an incredible amount of exciting things are happening on the music front. And one of the most exciting projects from this “alternative scene” is bassist Sverre Sæbø Quintet.

In the spring of 2025, they released their debut album If, however, you have not lost your self control on the excellent record label Sauajazz – a release that was brilliantly received both in Norway and internationally, and which was followed up with an extensive tour with concerts at, among others, Soddjazz and Kongsberg Jazz Festival.

As the program text says, “the music is a living and personal synthesis of Sæbø’s references, with clear nods to jazz history and names like Don Cherry, Henry Grimes and Charles Mingus, while the expression is rooted in a modern Nordic jazz landscape. The compositions carry an underlying intention and nerve, where rhythmic ostinatos and melodic phrases are shaped through a tight and dynamic interplay.” And for once, the program text writer is absolutely right. Because this was music that was creative, exciting and incredibly tough.

The band consists of alto saxophonist Heidi Kvelvane, tenor saxophonist Aksel Røed, trumpeter Andreas H. Hatzikiriakidis, drummer Amund Nordstrøm and bassist Sverre S. Sæbø, who is also responsible for the compositions.

Sæbø was also the “last to sign up” and assistant bassist at Esperanza Spaling’s concert on the opening day, and that was perhaps why this year’s Artist in Residence was sitting on a bar stool among the audience down in the raw basement of the record store and bar Fussy this evening.

During this hour, we got raw and fresh late-night bop with a lot of energy from the five musicians, who proved that the band worked just as well, if not better, in concert than on the already critically acclaimed album.

Now I’m going to be a little careful about mentioning Heidi Kvelvane’s alto saxophone playing, since she sits on the same jazz club board as the undersigned in Voss (she lives in a caravan at the village campsite). But calling her the heroine of the evening is not too harsh. She has become a fantastic alto saxophonist who delivers a number of solos where gunpowder mud sprinkles off the walls, while at the same time making an extremely solo effort in the ensemble playing. Together with tenor saxophonist Aksel Røed, they complement each other in the front with many duels that smell of burning, while at the same time they challenge each other in the saxophone solos, and we almost get a “saxophone battle” that smells of the good old days in Moldejazz history. The two of them’s strong playing almost makes trumpeter Andreas H. Hatzikiriakidis come a little in the shade, but where he gets the chance, he also delivers excellent solos while being extremely strong in the ensemble playing.

Amund Nordstrøm’s drumming could perhaps have been even more insistent, but there are limits to how intense this can be. He is in place the whole time, and together with the bandleader, they create the conditions, more than good enough, for the wind players in the front.

To hear such a fresh, young and dynamic Norwegian band, who have taken up the part of jazz history they love the most, and who clearly show that they are extremely dedicated to this particular form of modern jazz, is refreshing at such a large and important festival as Moldejazz. The Norwegian jazz audience will grow with such bands, and I have already invited Sæbø to bring his band and come to Voss during the spring of next year. A jättehöydare, as, perhaps, the Swedes would say.

What kind of tributes to Miles Davis should one actually accept?

A few years ago, the British trumpeter Emma-Jean Thackray played at the Oslo Jazz Festival, and I met a former Moldejazz manager (no one mentioned) after the concert. And I have never seen the old festival manager so angry. He thought the concert she did at the Oslo Festival was simply a disaster!

Tonight the British trumpeter was visiting Molde, where she was supposed to pay tribute to Miles Davis – the self-proclaimed boss of all bosses in the art of trumpet. I went there for one reason only: To check out if the trumpet-playing lady from Leeds was really as “crisis” as the former festival director claimed, if the job at the Oslo Jazz Festival was a “bad day at the office”, or if she could deliver the goods in Molde.

To put it bluntly: She didn’t deliver the goods! I mean – you don’t mess with Miles! If you’re going to pay tribute to the “master”, you have to have something to go with it, and deliver original, and preferably innovative music, just as Miles changed jazz five or six times (scholars argue about the number). With her on stage was drummer Dougal Taylor, keyboardist Elliot Galvin, who we’ve heard several times with saxophonist Marius Neset, and bassist Matt Gedrych, while in the program she is listed with trumpet, vocals, keyboards and guitar.

I happily admit that I was not inside the doors any longer than absolutely necessary, because I quickly realized that this did not bring anything positive. And as I sat outside and watched more and more shaking-head audience members come out, I became convinced that I had done the right thing. Life is simply too short for such bad and bland music.

Some claimed that they could live with the effort, right up until she started singing, while others offered relatively long explanations in an attempt to defend the lady and the band. But what I got was an empty jazz-rock comp that drowned out the trumpet playing, and where what you could hear was relatively boring, and far from what you would expect from a Miles tribute.

Then I had plans to round off the evening with the LA-based band SML up at Storyville, but found that the best thing to do was to take advantage of the two excellent concerts that day with Michala Østergaard Trio and Sverre Sæbø Quintet, and look forward to today, and new positive surprises, and brace myself for another occasional setback.

So while many people were sitting inside the excellent venue and bar Die Tankstelle right next to Plassen, sacrificing themselves for the semi-final of the World Cup, I instead climbed the five floors up to room 501 in the “collective” (which I still have all alone) at Hotell Molde (which I more than happily recommend to others), to get a few hours of much-needed beauty sleep (as if that would help anything).