Can't give up my jazztimes with Miles on the cover (sorry Pace) but for those interested in the NP Molvaer feature, here are some of the highlights, in his own words;
"Basically, American jazz has become not very interesting. There are a lot of good players, but are they forced to play that way? I don't know. But for me, personally I like Johnny Cash better than I do Wynton Marsalis. He's a great player but he doesn't move me. Johnny Cash moves me, you know what I mean?"
"I like the minimalistic grooves of European House, very trancey which you can easily relate to African music. I work with delays to make the rhythm float, so to speak. Some of the off-beats in rhythms like 7/8 and 9/16 have roots in an old tradition of ethnic music which I try to relate to the year 2001."
"I was listening to a lot of different stuff from Brian Eno to Jon Hassell to Bill Laswell and when it came time to go out on my own I wanted to mix all these ideas."
"Norway is a very interesting scene. There are so many things happening. It is not so hooked up to mainstream jazz like our close neighbors Sweden and Denmark. a lot of great American jazz musicians took up residence in both Sweden and Denmark and developed a very strong mainstream jazz scene there but in Norway nobody came because its cold and rocky!
In Norway, it's a different tradition. It started out with Manfred Eicher of ECM records developing the careers of people like Jan Garbarak, Terje Rypdal, Jon Chrsistensen, Arlid Andersen. So these people are our starting point. Musicians who are known to experiment - our base is a different one to the rest of Europe."
"It's luck. It's being in the right place at the right time. There are so many factors and I have been fortunate they happened all at once for me."
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There is also an insert on European nu jazz that talks about tried and true aj list favorites Bugge Wesseltoft and the Jazzland label, St. Germain, and Erik Truffaz, but also mentions 2 names I haven't heard discussed here;
Tenor saxophonist Julien Lorau has an album called Gambit on Warner France, mixing the tried and tested with urban tribal rhythms of the future.
Pianist Laurent de Wilde, a well conceived update of hard bop (Horace Silver's funky metier) that shows how the new rhythms inspire soloists...
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