BOOM!!! It was always like this; when school was about to start, the Travel Radio suddenly came to an end. After returning home from his dream of the Andalusian plains, Edmund Bakken had parked his Harley with a sidecar.
No more lazy breakfasts with the Travel Radio hosts. Kirsti Sparboe sang about a summer that was over, and Count Basie put down his baton at Red Bank. Now Eubie Blake’s “Memories of You” was back in Werner Müller’s over-arranged version.
We washed the remains of the salt water out of our hair, dried our socks after wading across the Storåe inside Gjendebu, and got ready for darker evenings and fiery red colors on the trees.
Much is the same today, decades later, but much is different. Not least, the Oslo Jazz Festival has risen as a modernized festival. And the counter-festival that protested, with the slightly humorous formulation, against all jazz after 1940 being described as ‘modern jazz’, came into being.
The Blow Out festival in Grünerløkka Airport, Mir, the old premises of Oslo Jazzhus in week 33 became a queer, humorous and social meeting place, where the scent of alternative and radical anarchism and exuberantly good music lived freely. Yes, even the smoking area outside the door became an important meeting place.
Gradually, the Oslo Jazz Festival also changed its character and program profile, and this was most clearly expressed when the Blow Out festival moved from week 33 to week 34. After the closure of the premises in the venerable Musikkens Hus, in the old maritime school of Svend Foyn, led to a few years of poor foothold, the festival has established itself safely at the same address, in the new Mir.
That is why we are also starting to make friends with the new venue, almost five years after Mir moved back to Toftes gate after the rehabilitation. Although some long and stolen glances are still cast towards the backyard and the old premises. If Kjell Aukrust and his companion Edmund Bakken, an old gentleman, a man of atmosphere and owner of Holmenkollskien, were still among us, the musical plains in the backyard could have provided room for many travel experiences.
Due to other commitments, I could not be present on the first day of the festival, Wednesday 19 August. I therefore missed the Swedish Folk Jazz Quartet. It was a good thing I had not put on my dancing shoes, otherwise the absence would have been unbearable.
But on the second day I am there. The first set of the evening is an unforgettable experience – Sidsel Endresen back on a stage close to me with her own material! With her Christian Wallumrød on piano, and Jan Martin Gismervik on percussion.
“Tell me everything … I could be anyone”. Memories and fragments of memories. The first time I experienced and understood Endresen’s greatness as a vocal artist and composer of free, open projects was when I heard the project she created for Nattjazzen’s 30th anniversary about 25 years ago, Living Rooms. A few months later I experienced her in a duo with Bugge Wesseltoft in the legendary jazz club New Morning, up in the 8th arrondissement in Paris, in the company of 3-400 enthusiastic French spectators. Since then, there have been many memories, great memories.
Today I experienced the same trembling intensity as the first time, even though “someone said memories are fictional”. If someone had dropped the mythical pin, it would have rumbled like an avalanche. The concentration, focus, compassion are total. The button was pressed, snap and snap cat. “Someone said …” or was it maybe Simon?
The three create a universe, a journey. Now I know something about how Odysseus’ journey to Hades and back was experienced. Endresen, Wallumrød and Gismervik have told. The journey to the realm of the dead is just one of the challenges the king of Ithaca must overcome on his journey, but perhaps the most defining in the hero’s journey. In book 11 – the middle of the five books in which Homer describes Odysseus’ journey – we are told of the meeting with the king’s own mother, Anticleia. She makes him understand that the realm of the dead is dark, that existence there is dark, painful and sorrowful.
What is reality, what am I, is it just a dream? Not just for pleasure, it is written above the proscenium in the Royal Theatre in Copenhagen – “this is the acceleration towards the vanishing point”, far behind the stage. Therefore, theatrical scenography is an art, an illusion-creating description of reality that ultimately becomes reality itself. It is a reminder of the reality that was. Therefore, Endresen’s performance, no, presentation, is an art.
It will be an emotionally strong meeting with the trio Endresen, Wallumrød, Gismervik. A meeting that creates realities, outside of reality, inside reality. That creates memories of reality. “I could be anyone”.
The second set this evening is a meeting with Xavier Charles on clarinet, Axel Dörner on trumpet and John Butcher on tenor saxophone. Together they are the trio The Contest of Pleasures. This trio goes back as far as the memories of Endresen’s Living Rooms. The album that gave the trio its name was recorded in Mulhouse, France, exactly 26 years ago. The music on the third and final album, Tempestuous, was recorded at the Huddersfield Festival just over six years later, in November 2006.
But this music is best experienced live. The reality of the record playing becomes only a shadow of a shadow of the reality where the music unfolded – produced itself – for the first time. And that is exactly what the Blow Out festival is all about! The magic lies in being present, experiencing the interaction, being part of the communication. Zirkularatmung, respiration circulaire, circular breathing. Kiertoilmahengitys in Finnish. In no other language is the term better, more concise and more effective than in Norwegian; circular breathing. The technique of holding pressure against the instrument so that the air flow goes, and the instrument’s sound-generating elements vibrate, swing, while you can breathe in through your nose, and fill your lungs for a new round.
Staring – daring – paring – clearing – pearing – hearing – searing – tearing – learing – pairing – bearing – bairning? – learning?. A port in Scotland. Aberdeen? A glass. Singles. Give me a glass. Does John Cage roll dice? Who throws the towel? Do you remember? When we were boys, and put cardboard discs with clothespins against the spokes of the rear wheel? Who got down the hill the fastest? No Harley. No Triumph. Rather, it was probably a DBS or a Diamant. Or maybe a Svithun? But wasn’t it stormy enough?
The third set this second day is a solo set with acoustic guitarist Finn Loxbo. A journey I unfortunately didn’t get to take. Fake and real flageolets, overtones on a swinging string. For me, it was all too static, to get me involved. I wish I had heard yesterday’s duo set between Loxbo and Bjørnar Habbestad. That would have given me a better introduction to this set.
However, the last set of the day was engaging. Isak Hedtjärn on clarinet and Anton Jonsson on drums and industrial and other percussion, had also played the night before, with the Swedish Folk Jazz Quartet and its recreation of Swedish folk music – you can even dance to it! With them tonight are Sigrid Aftret on tenor saxophone and Guro Kvåle on trombone. Jonsson is an expressive drummer who in many ways reminds me of Kresten Osgood – perhaps as a kind of illegitimate child of Osgood and Raymond Strid?
A fiery set, but not a set that grabs me emotionally, unfortunately. The Norwegian-Swedish quartet is bursting with competence and musical creativity, but I am left with the impression that it doesn’t really come together. There were some wonderful moments. There is also a lot of nice sound in empty cans of pomodoro tomatoes.
The night came and went, the second evening.
It has become a tradition that one of the foreign artists at the Blow Out festival gets a special assignment: To collaborate with the Østnorsk jazzsenter’s Youth Improv Orchestra and the 14-18 year old youth in the ensemble. This year it was Maggie Nicols who had received the request. The Scottish multi-artist has been part of the free landscape in the UK, as in London, for many decades, in the environment around John Stevens and the Spontaneous Music Ensemble. She has collaborated with, among others, Keith and Julie Tippett, and with Irène Schweizer on several occasions. Feminist Improvising Group – FIG. Ahhhh….!!
The Youth Improv Orchestra is directed and led by Henriette Eilertsen. But when Eilertsen had a gig in Saalfelden this evening with Jim Black’s new project You’re what’s for Dinner, it was Andreas Rotevatn who had to act as a local mentor for this project. Ida Reitan Arntzen on alto saxophone, Hermon Assefa and Simon Gjerlaugsen, both on trombone, Eira S. Ellingsen on drums and Judith E.S. Westgård on trumpet.
And now the legend is in Oslo. I wonder: Will the young people realize in a few years how lucky they have been? Perhaps similar to the awakening about luck and happiness that I myself had many years later, after I, as a 16-year-old, experienced a unique meeting that lasted 3-4 hours, as I remember it. Together with a childish handful of five or six other youngsters, we were given a lecture and musical demonstration by Karlheinz Stockhausen at Høvikodden.
That the memory of it probably makes it longer than it actually was – I assume it was a maximum of three school hours, on a Monday, when we had music as an elective in 9th grade. But it wasn’t long because it was boring. It felt long because it was bursting with strong impressions, insights, learning. So the memory lies, precisely because it tells something true.
Nicols on vocals, lyrics, piano and musical direction, the young people are provided with texts to be used, as fragments of words, opinions alongside instrumental contributions. It will be a good set, but is hampered somewhat by the young people’s weak performance skills. This was especially true of the text-based contributions. Whispers and shouts, said Ingmar Bergman. Some more shouting would have been appropriate. But that comes with practice.
Today’s second set will be the definite highlight of Friday. John Butcher on tenor saxophone and Kaja Draksler on piano. They had played together once before, we are told, but these are very experienced players in the free-form landscape. Draksler uses a keyboard next to the piano which gives her the opportunity to exploit microtonal spaces within the piano’s semitone intervals. Fascinating note rows, and note clusters where the notes between the notes really get to play along. With seamless communication there is also room for jumps and bounces, and tjo and hei. And four twigs don’t divide. There they become eight.
The third set on Friday is Hans Magnus Ryan solo on guitar. A Gibson ES 335, hand-decorated by fiddle maker Ottar Kaasa from Vinje. A pedalboard marked “one funk” not only gets one going, but a long line of people. Overdriven sound, Jan Garbarek introduced Norwegian folk tunes including “Scream & Howl” on the Garbarek-Stenson quartet’s Dancers. Atmospheric wanderings. Structures without bones, without gravity – therefore they don’t stand still. The experience of being overwhelmed, close to drowning, is not good, fighting to the surface with a pounding heart in your chest, thundering with fear. Gasping for air if the surface breaks, the exhaustion, and the certainty that this is not enough.
I gasp once more – it’s time for a final set tonight, a record release for Sulida & Axel Dörner. Tordenskiold had praised the festival’s programming. Where Rear Admiral Tordenskiold used soldiers in Marstrand in 1719, the Blow Out festival in Oslo in the 2020s uses musicians. Perhaps “Blow Out’s musicians” should enter the language in line with the term “Tordenskiold’s soldiers”?
Marthe Lea on tenor saxophone, Jon Rune Strøm on double bass and Dag Erik Knedal Andersen on drums and percussion, as well as Axel Dörner on trumpet. Dörner’s distinctive technique and creative world of expression is special. In the collaboration with Marthe Lea, we saw him not least in the commissioned work Ode to Play at the season opening at Victoria in January last year. For some reason, due to a collision I don’t remember now, I didn’t get to see today’s quartet’s concert at the Kongsberg jazz festival last year. But now the recording of this concert is being released on record, the album on the Sauajazz label has been named Etiwe.
A dancing set, just right for the night to come, where the entire room is used. Beat – beat – bop – bop, while Dörner does an Eddie Henderson. I still laugh at the frustration – and anger – of long-time NRK employee Erling Wicklund when he was the producer for a concert at Cosmopolite in Møllergata with Benny Golson as bandleader of the project he called We Remember Clifford.
Eddie Henderson on trumpet, Mike LeDonne on piano, Reggie Johnson on bass and Al Foster on drums. It seemed that Henderson did everything he could to not relate to the microphone setup, where he wandered around the stage, while Wicklund sat in the bus outside. In this venue, Dörner’s wanderings are not critical for us as listeners, and NRK has long since stopped showing any interest whatsoever in producing concerts with improvised music for radio. “Conversations” is what they have called one section of the album. And conversations, conversations, are really this.
Lea plays without any pretense, and formulates herself very effectively. Strøm is one of the most solid bassists we have today, who always comes up with something interesting. Knedal Andersen, who currently spends most of his time on paternity leave, is a drummer without the big facts and theatrical outcomes. But thank God it works well. And Dörner, there is a reason why he is sought after as a partner in a wide range of projects. And it finally became night, the third day.
Last night, this year’s Blow Out festival is entering its very last hours. In the first set tonight, Maggie Nicols is back, with lyrics, voice, piano and movement. This time with the duo Bohman Brothers. In the program, the last two, brothers Jonathan and Adam Bohman, are listed with the instrument designation dingser. And that is as good a description of their instrumentation as anything else.
Found objects could have been called a lot of it in a slightly more formal context – Adam’s table is filled with springs, glass, bobby pins and dippers. Jonathan’s table is somewhat more soberly equipped, and with a somewhat greater emphasis on sound-processing electronic tools. Both use piezo-electric pickups to create a sound material from their objects.
Star Pig – Mir’s mascot – is for me forever linked to my memory of the panther mentioned in the first chapter of James Joyce’s Ulysses. Stephen Dedalus, his friend ‘Buck’ Mulligan and the English Oxford student Haines spend a few days in the defensive tower the two Irishmen rent in Sandycove, just outside Dublin. Haines has nightmares about this panther and had muttered throughout the night about shooting it with the revolver he brought with him.
The memory was created after my visit to the Martello Tower during a stay in Dublin several years ago; there the panther lay on a sofa in the combined living room and bedroom where the staircase leads up to the viewing platform with a view over Muir Éireann – or the Irish Sea. It is up here that Buck Mulligan begins the book with a parody of a Catholic blessing – Introibo ad altare Dei.
Star Pig has today, for the first time, moved from its usual place by the wall, to a prominent place, right in the front of the stage. There he lies like a pasje, basking in the glow of all the attention. This is no coincidence, it turns out: Nicols opens the session with an intimate conversation with Star Pig, while she kisses him (for what is the object form of him?) tenderly several times. Star Pig gives his blessing to what is happening, but without Buck Mulligan’s theatrical facts.
Each participant in the trio is equipped with handwritten texts, manuscripts that seem to have been in frequent use. Some agreed features of the procedures are experienced, which point in the direction of a to some extent agreed large form. I have trouble reading the interaction here, with the exception of the verbalized texts. Fragments of meaning in a cacophonous chorus of ambiguous meanings. All meaning is local and incidental, on the large structural level it appears meaningless.
The meaning of life, death, love and the universe always lies in actions and interactions on the microplane. It is not found again on the macroplane. Is this what they want to convey? Is this what the ‘home of the worlds’ is? But is it really strange here? Or is it the experience of finding a kind of home? Nicols becomes a living, dancing, conveying center for my attention. That’s where I find meaning. That’s where I find joy. Also when she thanks Stjernegris after the concert, in the same way she introduced him before the concert.
As we have become accustomed to in recent years after the Blow Out festival returned to Toftes gate 69, Saturday’s second and fourth sets are brief solo sets that take place downstairs, where the football game that is otherwise always in place has been moved away to make room for as many people as possible. It’s easy to associate it with the rush to get down to the re-mix in the Beta room in Agder Teater, back when this venue was cramped, long and narrow, and only held a fraction of those present.
Today, the first set is a short and concise solo concert with cellist Wei Ting Tseng. A beautiful moment, but without it being a defining experience. The cello is an intimate instrument, and with a ‘schooled’ approach to the game, it appears controlled and under-communicated. Perhaps it is I who am overwhelmed by Nicols’ communicative abilities, or perhaps … if it is the previous two intense days that have taken their toll.
The third set up sits like a ball. Kaja Draksler on piano, Brandon Lopez on double bass and Karl Bjorå on guitar. Driving forward like a Jaguar D-type in the 200th turn on the Le Mans track, in the 24-hour race. With a long snout with round shapes, and its characteristic shark fin behind the driver, the car won three times in a row, in 1955-57. A boy who was born with the D-Jaguar, was early captured by the dream of D. Just as recognizable as D is a Gibson SG, with two horns on the side of the music.
Lopez is the drive and gear, Bjorå is the air that strokes along the round shapes. By virtue of the speed, the airflow stabilizes the entire propulsion, and accelerates the entire construction. Draksler is the pilot, constantly listening to the others, correcting, adjusting, responding. Optimizing. All for an efficient and energy-saving propulsion. All to get as far as possible during the metaphorical twenty-four hours of Le Mans, about halfway between Paris and Nantes. Huiii, where does it go!
Down to the basement for another table setting. Andrea Giordano has become a marked contribution to the experimental music scene in Oslo, after she chose to come here to study. After a master’s degree in improvisation, she also took a bachelor’s degree in composition, both at NMH. She is one of the curators of the SOFA catalog, one of the most exciting labels for experimental contemporary music.
She is thus a marked part of the broad, diverse music scene that continuously and without interruption includes art-pop, folk-based expressions, jazz, contemporary music, where the central role of improvisational expression in music creation is the common denominator.
All of this and more is today encompassed by the diverse improvisation scene that has developed in Scandinavia and Northern Europe over the last 20-30 years. All of which lays the foundation for the fact that we today live in the midst of a musical golden age that no one has ever seen before. But a golden age that, for obvious reasons, is never made known and understandable to the general public. We – the few – who spend large parts of our time on the inside know it.
The – vast majority – who live on the outside never get to know it, since all national news and cultural media that reach the entire population have abdicated their responsibility for general cultural dissemination. They have – almost collectively – decided that this music is of marginal interest, and should remain of marginal interest. It is not covered by any obligation whatsoever on anyone’s part to be socially beneficial and educational.
But the few of us who sit down in Mir’s B-room, we know that. That’s why we are here. That’s why we constantly meet up and support artists who sew together a marginal freelance life. That’s why we sit down, and look forward to listening to Andrea Giordano’s music-making with the help of electronic sound generators and his own voice. A journey of wonder, many questions, few answers, an adventure that twists, turns, turns, that eeles its way forward like an ivy in rough and overgrown terrain. Sometimes above, sometimes below, visible … and invisible.
Seen … and unseen. … Heard … and unheard. … Understood … and misunderstood. … Known … and unknown. It does something to us, it changes us, like a cry. In the night? Always new things are created. Always surprises. Always new lessons. Basis for new action.
Inger Hagerup said it in the poem Be impatient, man; “Slowly everything comes into being / Creation lasts forever. / Darkness became light and light fire / and man woke up one day and said: / I will.
But this we know, / that we are involved in creating eternal life, / creating it evil or good. / We will not lose. / We will not lose the fire we once received.
Many were the roads. It went wrong. / Strength became power, and power violence. / And people trampled each other down. / But always the dream was the ultimate / reality.
Be impatient, man! / Make your own tracks! / It concerns our eternal, short life. / It concerns our earth.”
The poem was first published in the collection Den syvende natt in 1947. The obvious references to a very recent prehistory in the poem’s time must have made it a strong experience to read the poem for the first time in the second half of the 1940s. For many of us for whom World War II is a distant and almost prehistoric matter, and who were made to analyze Hagerup’s poems in detail at school, it appears far stronger today, as infinitely relevant to our time.
The last party set with Ibelisse Guardia Ferragutti with Frank Rosaly and James McClure completely breaks with the physical and mental state I am in. After two songs, I am therefore ending this year’s Blow Out festival.
The fourth night watchman was not out tonight.
A kind of summary
This year’s festival is, like all the previous ones, a diverse smorgasbord. A cold buffet, a stew, a conglomerate, a mélange – dear child has many names. Melange margarine – mixed margarine – was the margarine in 1919 that was supposed to mix marine and vegetable fat so that the product had no taste of its own. A tasteless product that was not allowed to use a cow as a trademark, which is why a deer was placed on the package. Deer milk? We have deer on us, was (and is?) the Russian slogan of Stabekk gymnasium. The Blow Out festival does not have a deer on it, but it does have a Star Pig. The festival is definitely not tasteless either. But it is melange.
Did you know that in Japan a diverse cold table can be referred to as baikingu, that is, as a Viking? The Blow Out festival is like a baikingu, Thematically related Vikings, music to fulfill dreams to, but also music that is above everything, under everything, next to everything and on everything.
Besides this, why be big when you are happy as a child? Why be yourself enough, and want to become emperor in Galilee or wherever it was, when you can be yourself? Compact games, was the description of the Lillehammer Olympics when the application was submitted. We like festivals where everything is manageable, where everything happens on one or two stages. Where there is a common course for everyone present, there is also a common experience, a group feeling, a community. This makes the festival stronger, and the impact is greater.
It also means that it is much easier to maintain an artistic profile. In this respect, the Blow Out festival is one of our favorite festivals, alongside Punkt in Kristiansand, among others. There are a number of such festivals, where you can still get the full festival experience, where you can still get a home.
The Blow Out festival has now taken over the role that Reiseradioen, Edmund Bakken and Kirsti Sparboe had previously. The festival is a celebration of a diverse, complex community, of the end of summer, of the arrival of autumn. The festival is a homely and familiar lighthouse, a goal that organizes our experience of the world. This is how the Blow Out festival has been for us since its inception, and this is how we hope that the Blow Out festival will continue to be in the future. Mèlangez tout, mèlangez le tout avec tout.
