Whimsical, out-of-the-box, knowledgeable, strong-signaling and subtle music that makes you dance jazz ballet in the strangest time signatures and with the strangest movements west of… well, west of what?
Well, maybe west of the Bolshoi Theatre? What do I know? Not much. But I learn, constantly and always. Everything new you encounter is a source of new insight. Like Håvard Wiik and all his friends.
The Wiik principle
Wiik’s music is fascinating, a kind of cultural-historical review of European philosophy and art history in and after the great breakthrough of modernism in the early 20th century. Yes, it is a game of references, which can provide humorous insights into the Wiik’s universe, but it is also music – as music – that is playfully alive, tantalizingly danceable, but never cantabile. Or maybe not? Perhaps a text for a Wiik composition could be exactly what the world needs in these times where madness reigns, and where ignorance, racism, lack of general knowledge and simply reactionary attitudes are allowed to freely express themselves in all their idiocy.
What we see today is a perversion of freedom of expression, where the freedom to express one’s opinions is also the freedom to blame oneself for one’s own ignorance and lack of reflective capacity. But we also live in a time where we have forgotten – or are pushing away – our own responsibility to clean up this madness. Our responsibility to speak out, to stop the linguistic shift. FrP and other extreme right-wing parties have been successful over several decades in one area; they have driven forward a shift in the boundaries of what is acceptable to express in public. In a political debate, claims and attitudes can be made today that just 10-15 years ago would have been totally unacceptable. What would have been hate speech ten years ago would have been considered against the provisions of the Penal Code.
Then combine this with the fact that we have tacitly accepted that it is the brown gore that is spilling out, that has been allowed to set the premises for where the boundaries between freedom of expression and the criminal laws should be. We seem to have forgotten that freedom of expression comes with two significant limitations. The right to express yourself does not mean that you can do it anywhere or anytime. You have no right to force yourself into any arena, any platform or any premises. You have a duty to respect the rules that the owner/manager of the arena sets. If you violate this, expulsion or banning is not a limitation of your freedom of expression. And that’s how it goes now.
The limits of freedom of expression
Furthermore: The right to assert your opinion, no matter how ignorant, radical, reactionary or crazy it may be, does not entail the right to express hatred, does not entail any right whatsoever to demand that the other – the one you disagree with – should think the same, do the same, or be punished for not doing this. It does not give you any right to characterize the other, no matter how much you may think so. Remember that an important part of the right to free expression is the requirement to listen.
These limits are absolute, and if you violate them, you should, and must, be held accountable. Initially verbally. Calling (them) out is an expression in international, broken English. Bring the trolls out into the light, where they crack. Call it out! When marinated idiots wave the flag and an extreme form of nationalism, call them out! When ignorant imbeciles claim to know, and demand that you accept it, where the line between us and them is, call them out! When ignorant empty-headed people insist that there are only two genders, whether the argument is that it is in a certain book, that it is simple biology, or that it is “obvious” in other ways, call them out! When foggy meatheads claim to know what “Norwegian culture” is, and what is not Norwegian, call them out! When tight bathing caps put forward lies about the world around us then and now, call them out! Call them all out!
Also this: Freedom of speech has always had an important premise, you should always respect the other’s equal right to express their opinions, no matter how politically unacceptable you may think they are. Furthermore, you should never present your evaluative statements and positions as facts and indisputable truths. You should always be prepared to change your positions. You also have an independent responsibility to substantiate your positions and opinions. And you must, upon request, immediately be able to show or indicate what this basis is.
Why is this so important? Because this freedom of expression has an essential purpose. A purpose that serves us all. It is part of the ongoing work of building societies in which everyone, regardless of class, background, where one was born, when one grew up, should have equal opportunities to realize their own mental and physical resources, interests, abilities, desires and goals for their own lives.
Your freedom is my freedom
This requires an inviolable freedom over one’s own life. No one, absolutely no one, has the right to limit this freedom, as long as it does not infringe on ‘the other’, or limit this other’s right to realize their wishes and goals for their lives. Freedom is limited only through a collective, common agreement about where these limits are. You can never demand specific limits that you may think should apply to the other. You can never impose or demand statements, attitudes, behavior or other social actions from the other, no matter who it may be. And you can never demand more from the ‘other’ than you demand from yourself.
This applies regardless of the size of your cabin in the mountains or your bank account, regardless of whether your father or mother was a cleaner or a prime minister, a bird or a fish, a drug addict or an alcoholic. Regardless of whether you are a preacher for one or the other, with or without a uniform, no matter how “Norwegian” you may feel.
Habeas corpus. We all learned this at school. Many of us also learned – wrongly – that the term was introduced in 1215 in the Magna Carta when King John – who was said to be landless, which is also not true – was forced to enter into an agreement with the nobility and landowners of England. The agreement guaranteed “free men” – homo liber, today we would probably add et mulier libera here, to remove all doubt – basic rights. The most important right was the protection against unjustified deprivation of liberty. The principle that eventually came to be known by the short form habeas corpus – was not a principle that one “owned” one’s own person, so to speak. You “have” your own body, as some of us were taught by teachers who had not understood it.
No, it is none of these. It is a principle of legal procedure that ensures everyone protection against unjustified imprisonment or other deprivation of liberty. It is primarily a reference to a group of legal procedural principles, especially habeas corpus ad subjiciendum – addressed to the detaining authority, often thinking of the King: Everyone who is deprived of his liberty shall have his case tried by a court of law before an independent judge: You shall ensure that the person deprived of his liberty is physically present in court, to have his case tried.
The words are not used in Magna Carta, but the origin of this principle is indeed found in paragraphs 38 and 39 of the original formulation. The original version from 1215 was adjusted and changed, after the Pope had protested and nullified the document. John’s son Henry completed a revision of the agreement in which these points were now numbers 28 and 29. In the text, the 1225 revisions to the original 1215 points are indicated by underlining:
Homines liberi, liberae et libera
When Donald Duck Prump’s new stormtroopers take off and lock up thousands of innocent people, and also deport them, it is a blatant and provocative violation of these old principles of justice, principles of justice that are inscribed in the law and justice of both the UK and the US. When the ice-covered vandals kill and terrorize on orders from above, when individuals are robbed of their rights, simply because they are who they are, then it is a mockery of centuries-old institutions that were built to secure the population against the random and unfounded attacks on those rights by the ruling class. When Krump violates the vast majority of constitutional regulations, laws and protections of the individual, simply by opening a bodily orifice, and then being allowed to continue doing so, it is no longer just ridiculous.
When even Norwegian editors of opinion-influencing bodies and central representatives of major political parties, here and in our neighboring countries, call him tough, and cheer him on, it is a sign of how weak the population’s understanding of the rule of law and our democracy is. And thus how vulnerable these institutions are. This not only undermines society, it encourages behavior that today oozes out of all brown, dark corners. It encourages a form of conversation that undermines any attempt to improve our societies, to work for us to come even a little closer to the ultimate ideal of freedom, equality and sisterhood/brotherhood.
Freedom comes to all of us with a great responsibility, and we must take that responsibility. Otherwise, we will quickly end up in a society where having the body is an empty protection against the various ins and outs of capricious leaders. No free man or woman shall ever be deprived of his liberty, his property, his liberties and free customs violated, or be the victim of restrictions in the exercise of his rights by others, in any other way than by lawful judgment of his or her equals, or by the lawful laws of the land. Homines liberi, liberae et libera in all countries, unite! Habeamus corpora ad subjiciendum. You shall not judge without having listened, without domination and openly, to the person you accuse. When someone wants to limit your right to assert your opinions in a public arena, provided that the expressions are within the bounds of law and ethics, they deprive you of freedom, and they thereby violate this fundamental principle.
Into the great wide open
Sometimes you sit and wonder where it went, the anarchistic joy and faith in the future that we had in the future of the internet when it took the big step out of the open and investigative, community-building security of the university world and out into the wide open landscape outside. Into the great wide open was the name of the thick Uninett textbook that everyone employed in the university sector in Oslo was given around 1990-95. Today, this world is wide open and quantitatively large, but far from large in a qualitative sense.
Behind it all, there is still the curious, interactive, intergenerational, complex information world we dreamed of. Some of us use it constantly and with great benefit. But what you first encounter is the internet as a social meeting place, where it is free for everyone to look up wall newspapers. The conversation around the coffee table at work has moved into the public sphere, without any of the actors having received any training in what this ‘public’ entails. A public meeting place that many still perceive as a private coffee table.
It is a public meeting place where we have let the sewage flow, where we have allowed the boundaries of acceptable behavior and speech practices, the boundaries of what is hate speech, to be moved again and again. Much of this is the result of something positive, a desire to protect freedom of expression as the fundamental liberal freedom. Freedom of expression is where all other freedoms start. And that is how it goes these days.
The way forward
But the freedom to express desires about the unfreedom of others is not part of freedom of expression. Demanding or arguing that someone should be deprived of their liberal rights because they are who they are is not part of the right to expression. Claiming that someone is not who they experience themselves to be is not protected speech. You shouldn’t bother others, you should be decent and kind, and otherwise you can do as you please, said Police Chief Bastian in Torbjørn Egner’s Kardemomme by. It’s a simple and great ideal, naive, but good.
What’s missing is that those who make money on these meeting places are systematically held accountable for what is published on their platforms. As far as I understand, regulation is underway in Brussels that will hold the tech giants accountable before long. We must dare to demand that our hard-earned rights and social structures are not undermined, either by hidden actors with evil intentions or by a flood of brown coffee grounds. Setting limits for, banning, hateful, destructive, inhumane speech and imposing quality assurance and labeling of information that is published is not restricting freedom of expression. It is protecting long-term freedom of expression. It is to give our grandchildren an opportunity to experience a society where one strives towards, and hopefully is even closer to, an ideal of a society where everyone, regardless of class, background, where one was born, when one grew up, should have equal opportunities to realize their own mental and physical resources, interests, abilities, desires and goals for their own lives.
Wiik’s companions
Such thoughts are evoked by the Håvard Wiik Trio with Håvard Wiik and his companions: Ole Morten Vågan on double bass and Håkon Mjåset Johansen on drums. These are people who have known each other since the dawn of time, sometime in the late 1990s. And who meet again and again. Each one of them appears in their own bands, other people’s bands and each other’s bands. The story of the attack on Marstrand and Karlsten Fortress and the many soldiers of a certain rear admiral from Trondheim when the Great Northern War was coming to an end in 1719, and the rumor that he was spread in the small Swedish coastal town, is well known. But it is a structural metaphor that also largely applies to Norwegian and Scandinavian jazz.
In 2007, the album The Arcades Project was released with Håvard Wiik Trio, named after the English title of Walter Benjamin’s unfinished work Das Passagen-Werk about Paris. My review of the album was published in the February/March issue of Jazznytt in 2008, page 61. Incidentally, the same issue as my presentation of Shannon Mowday for Norwegian readers, and publication of the result of a memorable conversation with pianist Uri Caine. Time goes by. Day goes by.
It would be eleven years until the next album from the trio, with Ceci n’est pas une Valse as the title song, or as the album was then called; This is not a Waltz. The reference dares to be known. You can read the editor’s review of the album here. Now it would be five years until the next and last time with the trio so far. I last heard the trio at the National Jazz Scene, about 800 meters from here. It was in mid-April and it has been three years since we experienced three magicians – three magician musicians – who served us a knowledgeable buffet, served with compassion, understanding and control by mature gentlemen, who built bridges between the here and the hereafter.
So today’s number series is 11, 5 and 3. Where does it end? The sum is 19, but we didn’t get any 19-bars, as far as I could listen to. How many different sub-parts can you divide a 19-bar into? How many different variations can you have? Even if you ignore permutations… 3-3-3-3-3-2-2 or 5·3 + 2·2, that was one. And the day goes by. That’s how you can also wonder, after a concert with Wiikske krumspring.
Can you read law?
After lawyer Thomas Horne has welcomed and introduced the band, we get this: First up; “Pentimento”. The title has nothing to do with penta, five. Nor does it point to painture, although the track gets warmer. The origin goes (of course) back to Latin, to the verb paeniteō, I repent, I punish (myself), in the infinitive form paenitēre. In Italian, this was transformed into the verb pentirsi in the infinitive. By attaching -mento it becomes a noun, pentimento. Much like in memento, a memento.
The word is used for paintings: When a painter has put a picture on a canvas where he or she has previously made another painting. The parts of the first picture that show up in faint reflections, small remnants that shine through, are a pentimento. Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa went through several changes, remnants of which have been discovered after detailed studies of the picture, also of her smile. Pentimento. In Pablo Picasso’s The Old Guitarist from his Blue Period (c. 1901-04), a standing woman appears upon closer study. All of these are pentimens, pentimens, or pentimens, in Norwegian, perhaps? Should there be any pimientos?
Memories of a past, a pentimento sets the standard. Wiik & compadres are like the UV light that reveals these underlying structures, they show the patterns in them. We quickly realize that this is going to be a big evening. A new record is coming in the fall, so the number series is now 11, 5, 3, ½! Does it converge? Or will we, like Zeno’s hare, forever have to run after the tortoise to try to catch up with the tortoise?
“Parliament of Owls”, the owls hooting and hooting, owls have become a symbol of knowledge, of wisdom. Often inscrutably so. Of course, it refers to Minerva’s owl, or in the Greek cultural circle, Athena’s owl. But this owl’s wisdom is retrospective, Minerva’s owl takes to its wings when the shadows of the night gather, said the great Georg W. F. Hegel. Philosophy can only understand the world and man in what has been. Never in what is to come. I would argue that it is in contrast to the artist Håvard Wiik. In his world, wisdom does not rest when the rays of the new day come out of all the caves and nooks, before the sun again spreads light and understanding over a new world.
«Rain Dark». But it can be dark when the downpour comes. Dark clouds can be thick enough to turn day into night. Then the owl of wisdom is an important factor, like a torch it can light up and show the way even when all hope is gone. A double hour that makes us, and all the owls, sit up straight, and follow every tick and tock, bamm and boom. Every run on D and A strings.
The artists’ room and time
Know this: The room this unfolds in is a large common room, the first thing you enter when you enter the Artists’ House. It is referred to as a vestibule. The house is a building that will soon celebrate 100 years. The idea of an artists’ house with exhibition spaces had been discussed and under development for many years. In 1925, one of the conflicting lines was whether the house should be located in Slottsparken – on the plateau towards Fredriks gate – or in the areas around the Observatory, below today’s National Library. But also a location on Kontraskjæret along Rådhusgata was also an option that was up for grabs, along with other options on Ruseløkka and the surrounding area, Bestefarstomta, Auroratomta, many possibilities.
The artists seized the opportunity. On November 8 of that year, the Branntoomta was purchased by the association Bildende Kunstneres Styre – BKS – from the landowners for approximately 100,000 kroner. The Artists’ House had a place. Before the day was over.
Things happened quickly now. An architectural competition was announced in January 1928, with a deadline of April 30, 1928. When the architectural firm of Gudolf Blakstad and Herman Munthe-Kaas won first prize with the project they called Felix, the new functionalism had come to Norway. They also won third prize in the competition with Nu.
In 1925, the architects Blakstad/Munthe-Kaas had been commissioned to draw a draft of the house, then in a monumental neoclassical style. The same style as the project, St. Hans, with which they won the competition for the new town hall in Haugesund in 1922. Haugesund’s stately town hall from 1931 sits like a lion on its cliff with a view over the park in front and down to the path through Smeasundet. After postponements and delays in the construction process, the final building was pulled in a more functionalist direction than the original plans. As I said, this is in the middle of the period of functionalism’s breakthrough in Norwegian architecture. Fascinating.
The house was built based on the results of the architectural competition, where the winners incorporated elements from the other purchased proposals. A comparison of the Artists’ House, when it was completed, with the model of the final proposal that the architects and BKS had made, shows that the facade has been made lighter and airier. A great building, a monument, a piece of memory. It’s just a shame that the three ‘other’ sides of the building are almost invisible where they are sandwiched against the neighboring plots.
After adjustments and incorporation of elements from the other purchased proposals, they were ready to announce the National Art Exhibition in Wergelandsveien in October 1930. For me, who has stepped into my student shoes in the Physics Building at Blindern, it’s like coming home again to see Per Krogh’s ceiling paintings here.
But with 10-15(?) meters under the ceiling, a large room with hard walls, it is not a room that is tailor-made or for acoustic activities. It is a room where any attempt at amplification would awaken phantom waves, resonances and reflections far beyond the music. The band has therefore chosen to play completely dry, without any form of amplification. We are placed at one end of this room towards the west side of the building, and with professional musicians, together with a (for the occasion and weekday) large audience, there is, at least from where I sit, very good sound. Detailed, crisp, crisp, bold sound.
Chromatic thanks
A title with details that were lost – I try my hand at “From the Hat-Trick to the Optic(k)”. “Aporia”, impenetrable, incomprehensible. But Wiik’s music is not incomprehensible. It is complex, with many layers, it is a rebus run, but never incomprehensible. Dancing, bold and funny. Chromatic solo in all colors. Both the colors of the rainbow, and all the others. How many colors are there? How many angels can fit on the head of a pin? A continuum cannot, in itself, be discretized, the division is ours, man-made, an approximate interpretation. To make the infinite understandable, tangible. Just as Wiik does in his wanderings up and down. Before Vågan and Mjåset Johansen snap and join the color count.
The next one describes Charles Baudelaire’s cat, Wiik tells it. Since Wiik uses the feline singular, he is probably pointing us to Baudelaire’s “Le Chat”, and not to the same author’s “Les Chats”, I guess.
It’s like little raindrops falling on water. Have you heard that? Like singing glass. While the cat dances. Maybe it’s just that the mysterious pandimensional beings who have built the Earth as a giant calculator to find the answer to the ultimate question, the question of Life, the World, and the Everything, show up in our world as mice, then the highest angels, the seraphim, show up in our world as cats? “Wonderful”, to quote the writer who was sitting there when it happened, with scribbles, scribbles, and a scribble pad at the ready. While the day goes on, yes.
The art is to do the infinite
“The Ballad of Toshi and Yoko”, the tribute to the Japanese composer Toshi Ichiyanagi. It is both discreet and indiscreet charm, it is sturm und drang, it is quiet calm. Can you hear the pin drop? We sit on the edge of the chair and/or the floor. Stretching our ears out to catch every little detail. The Vågan plucks overtones on its four strings. Minimum bow force, MBF, close to the chair, there are an infinity of them, countable this time.
Can we understand infinity? And how many types of infinity are there? There are infinitely many. Georg Cantor was probably the first to show that all our intuition – which is based entirely on our encounter with finite sets – is questionable, and most often completely wrong, when it comes to infinite sets. The classic example is the question of how many even numbers there are? 0, 2, 4, 8, etc. Are there fewer than the number of natural numbers? 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, etc. The even numbers correspond to every other number in the set of natural numbers. So of course, we say with our everyday experience, there are fewer even numbers than natural numbers. There are exactly half as many!
And with that we have already made a mistake. There are actually the same number of numbers in both sets, and that is precisely because they are infinite sets. Our answer applies to finite sets, but not to infinite sets. And the worst thing is that the proof that this is so is so simple that you can explain it to a child. And the child will understand the proof. What that proof is, you can think about for yourself. I’ll give you a hint: If you can’t find your way, it might help you to look up what is known as Hilbert’s Grand Hotel. Once you have solved the receptionist’s problem, you are well on your way.
For all such numbers, even numbers, natural numbers, numbers of the form m n, for all finite values of m, all this is one infinity. The number of real numbers, rational and irrational numbers, on the other hand, is a completely different kind of infinity. Countable and uncountable sets. And so it goes.
This is what makes mathematics so beautiful. Seeing infinity. Understanding not understanding these and infinitely many other infinities. This is what makes music so important, so beautiful, so moving, seeing the infinity within infinity. All this while Mjåset Johansen plays 4 against 7, n against m, so it sits in the walls around us. Håkon whisks/ Håkon whisks with a sense of time/ it whistles tenderly / you haven’t dreamed. There are chromatic exercises, challenges, etudes, studies.
Everything and everyone everywhere at all times
“Omnistrain” (or is it “Omnistrane). Omni, omnis, is not about NIS. Everything and everyone, everywhere and every place. For every step. We don’t dance on the way to school, that’s a long time ago. But life is an exploration, a learning process. Trane would have been 100 years old this year. I wonder if John Coltrane would have understood this music? I think so, because he understood that sometimes music is just music. Sometimes music is life itself. We feel like omniscient, like all-knowing, seraphic cats – or are they feline seraphim?
And then: Mjåset Johansen in free expression. With impeccable timing, and beat. Breathe in, breathe out. Breathe-in-breath-in-breath-in-breath-in-…. Bombs and grenades! The bass drum bangs, it lingers like Jimmy Cobb’s cymbals on the beat when Miles lands on the first deep D, before he flies off on “So What” in March 1959. And this is what …
“STOP!” What was that? Is something burning somewhere? … No … Is this a fixed game? … No, the three in front of me look like the same question marks as the rest of us. The band stops. A random audience member has clearly had enough. I’m kicked back to performative art experiences – performances – in the 1970s. Interactive art, participating, not spectating. Hurray!
After we’ve calmed down, the band comes back up, or rather, what’s more correct, comes back up. Same procedure, etc. … and the encore is … of course, “What Reason Could I Give” by Ornette Coleman. Harmolodica and harmolodicb, -c, …. All the way to harmolodics. The music is like a loving harmolodic, which sneaks into the ear canals, and stays there. …
Until next time! Because in the fall there will be an album with Wiik and his cronies. We are starting to rejoice. No, we are not starting, we have started to rejoice a long time ago.
Ceci n’était pas une concert. It was not even a reproduction of a concert. There was so much more …
