Trygve Seim looks forward to Cork Jazz Fest gig with Hungarian guitarist
Trygve Seim teams up with Zsófia Boros at the Triskel for Guinness Cork Jazz Festival. Picture: Antonio Armentano
As I speak to Norwegian saxophonist and composer Trygve Seim by phone aboard a train leaving Hamburg, the station announcements pepper our conversation as he heads for Cologne. He’s off there to play two nights with a quartet, before heading on to Vienna. Such is the peripatetic life of the modern jazz musician.
Vienna will be something of a prolonged stop, however. He’ll be there to meet up with the Hungarian guitarist Zsofia Boros. The two plan to spend a week working on material for their upcoming show at Triskel Christchurch during the Guinness Cork Jazz Festival.
Theirs is just one of three ECM-themed performances across one day at Triskel this year (see panel). In fact, they would never have teamed up if it wasn’t for their shared record label, which threw them together last year for an 80th birthday celebration of founder Manfred Eicher at Hamburg’s Elbphilharmonie.
“Yes,” says Sein, “she and I are together because it was ECM’s idea. We’d never played together before. So that was a first meeting. Cork will be our second meeting.”
Seim previously played the Cork venue with accordionist Frode Haltli, with whom he’s released a number of albums, including Our Time earlier this year. “Triskel is a really great venue, a nice place to play,” he recalls.
The pairing of Boros and Seim represents the two sides of the esteemed ECM label: jazz, or improvised music, and classical. Boros records under ECM’s “New Series” imprint. It’s not so new now, having just marked 40 years, but it has garnered a stellar reputation over the years, on the back of influential releases such as Arvo Part’s Tabula Rasa and Steven Reich’s Music for 18 Musicians.
“She's more strictly a classical player, who's not an improviser,” Seim says. “So we kind of have to adapt to that. She plays composed lines. Her part is mostly composed. I’ll play composed lines, but I improvise around it.”
Balancing between the improvised and composed is of course something every jazz artist has ideas about. And Seim is no different. For the Cologne gigs he’ll be with Markku Ounaskari on drums, Arve Henriksen on trumpet, and Anders Jormin on bass.
“With this band for example we have four or five compositions that we know,” he says. “But we don’t know if we’ll play one of them, all of them, or none. We just improvise. I like both sides of it. It’s so much fun to do that, totally improvised stuff as well. But the most important thing is to listen. What is happening? What does this need me to do? Should I hop onto the other’s idea, or do something completely different? In a way, it’s composing as well, but composing spontaneously.
“Interplay to me is more important,” he says, contrasting with the more American-associated approach of individual players soloing around a theme or standard. “And also the melodic,” he says, “to create something beautiful, that the listener will enjoy.”
For Seim, this remains a difference between the European and American approaches to improvised music. “The standards repertoire is still very strong in America,” he says. “The younger players play a lot of the standards. Most of it is from Broadway musicals, from soon to be 100 years ago. This is a big difference, it seems to me. In Norway, or with people I play with, we’re not so concerned with playing the standards material.
"The American jazz scene also seems to be more and more focused on complexity, bringing in very complex harmonic structures and very complex rhythmical structures. The more complex the better. Of course, we do this too, but not so much that it feels like it’s complexity for the sake of complexity, if you know what I mean. I’m OK with the complexity, if it sounds good. But not if it doesn’t sound good!”
As for how the Cork concert will break down, he is looking forward to the week with Boros. “She’s such a great player, and easy to play with and easy to form the music with. I think maybe we have the same kind of aesthetic and feeling in the music.” What that shared aesthetic will produce, well: “I will know more in a week,” he says. An intriguing prospect, then, for the Cork audience.
- Trygve Seim and Zsofia Boros play Triskel Christchurch on Sunday, October 27
Cork Jazz at Triskel 2024 has been dubbed the 'Year of Alice Coltrane', and what better way to mark it than with a tribute to that maestro of spiritual jazz, led by Alina Bzhezhinska on the harp, who will be joined by keyboardist Brian Jackson. She and her group play on the Thursday and Friday of the festival.
On Friday, the Japanese trumpeter Takuya Kuroda brings his blend of jazz, funk, and fusion. Saturday’s highlight at Triskel will be percussionist Marilyn Mazur and her group.
On Sunday, a solo piano show from Nitai Hershkovits, and Jakob Bro’s guitar-led trio round off that day’s all-ECM lineup.
