Music that inspires hymn this jazz weekend

Tord Gustavsen’s Nordic leanings could help produce one of the gigs of the jazz weekend, writes Alan O’Riordan.

Tord Gustavsen made his musical name as the leader of a piano trio that released three acclaimed albums from 2003 to 2007, as he joined the likes of Esbjorn Svensson in popularising the idea of ‘Nordic jazz’.

There followed success as a quartet, and with various side projects and collaborations.

There was tragedy, too, with the early death, in 2011, of bass player Harald Johnsen, which may explain why it’s only now that Gustavsen has returned to the trio format, in the shape of a rather aptly titled album, The Other Side.

"Experiencing the tragic passing of Harald, it didn’t feel right to just form a new trio. It felt more right to explore different soundscapes,” Gustavsen says, speaking ahead of his visit to the Guinness Cork Jazz

Festival as part of Triskel’s ECM Weekend.

I felt now that the time was right to have the piano a bit more in the melodic foreground again and to revisit and reopen the trio interplay.

"I think it had to take this long because the quartet and the other projects felt really strong and important. It had to take this long until I could go into the studio and just be in the here and now, playing with the trio,

instead of having the feeling I was following up on something.”

Sigurd Hole is the new bassist on The Other Side, joining the stalwart Jarle Vespestad on drums.

“The interplay with Jarle on drums has developed over a period of almost 20 years and he continues to surprise me with his playing every night.

"That’s such a blessing to know someone that well musically, and still be amazed and surprised. The dynamics, the micro-timing, the textures, the rhythmic layers we create together, it’s really special.

“With Sigurd, his melodic inventiveness, combined with the strong sensual foundation he lays out is very important part of the way we play. We combine all the time simplistic lyrical playing with exploring and finding textures, changing roles: he embodies this paradoxical combination in a very accomplished way.

“He has a highly developed arco technique, as one says in the classical world: playing with the bow — lots of percussive aspects to it, soloing a lot with the bow — that adds several different colours to the trio. I find it very inspiring, the kind of interplay we’ve developed with it.”

The Other Side ranges widely in terms of the music it draws on. It revisits some familiar Gustavsen terrain, drawing on Norwegian folk and sacred music. There are original compositions, too, and versions of three Bach chorales.

Gustavsen views this kind of material, the hymnal books he grew up with, the baroque, sacred music, as almost a European mirror to the Great American Songbook that forms a bedrock for so much of the great jazz tradition.

“I learned the hymns long before I learnt the songs of the American jazz canon,” he says. “When I improvise over hymns, that’s me playing the songs that are closest to my heart. They are, in a way, my standards as a jazz musician.”

ROOTS AND CULTURE

The roots of this European approach to jazz go back to the 1970s, when the likes of Jan Garbarek began to see the European folk tradition as grist to the improvisational mill.

“But I think it is becoming even more evident now,” Gustavsen says, “that there are different sensibilities and different strengths in Europe, as opposed to America. It’s like more and more bands are finding a way to play that is not an inferior version of what the Americans are doing but something distinct, unique.

That is, of course, much more satisfying and artistically worthwhile, than creating a second-rate copy of something.

The Other Side is an expansive, warm, and refined album that seems itching for a live-performance shakeout. The live performance, with improvisation at its heart, sustains Gustavsen the performer, but has also attracted him as a thinker.

Away from the piano keyboard, he has applied his combined his interests in musicology and psychology to explore ideas about improvisation and the “dilemmas” or paradoxes it embodies.

“It’s not like I think people should view the music according to the words or concepts I use, but to me exploring from a theoretical standpoint the parallels between the challenges of improvisation and the challenges of intimate relationships using musical theory was a very fruitful thing to do.

"It’s about restraint and passion; it’s about being inside every musical moment, and at the same time having perspective; it’s about being childlike and analytical at the same time. These paradoxes, I think, everyone in a way feels them, but in different ways.”

Improvised music, then, has a special quality, where these paradoxes can be explored and experienced, by performer and audience. “Good improvised music can have very special potential for being a place where we have an encounter ourselves, in all senses of that word,” Gustavsen says.

“Almost a spiritual or therapeutic encounter.”

Tord Gustavsen plays Triskel Christchurch on Sunday at 8pm as part of a double bill with Kit Downes.