Gard Nilssen: Multi-Faceted Lord Of Molde

The Moldejazz festival in Norway is pushing very close to its 60th birthday, due in 2021. This year’s six-day edition balanced starry hall-fillers and deeply alternative, pesky experimenters in smaller housings. The fjord location of Molde prompts relaxation through scenic vistas, but once inside the intimate Storyville Jazz Club, sonic devastation is sometimes inevitable.

Some of the biggest gigs might not be appealing propositions, such as those by Gregory Porter, Take 6 and Incognito, but a festival highlight was provided by the Stateside singer Melody Gardot (pictured below), who sold out the lofty Bjørnsonhuset. She may have been born in New Jersey, but Gardot encourages an aura of Paris, not least by living there during the last few years. Each time she appears on stage, there’s always a different vibration, a fresh presentation. This time Gardot posed, poised, by the side of her piano, directing the Armenian string quartet that she’d spontaneously invited on tour. Songs, even if familiar, got deconstructed, quietened down and made sparse, such as the breathy ‘Wayfaring Stranger’, with just her voice and the strings. Then, some pronounced deep bass and mallet-thunder drums set a scene of slow-strutting bluesy ragtime. Gardot is almost as clunky and clanky as Tom Waits in her current incarnation. She shifted the emphasis to bossa nova with her own ‘Goodbye’, picking up her guitar and giving thanks to the departed João Gilberto, then gliding into his hit, ‘Corcovado’. Gardot was a natural communicator throughout her set, dealing with starstruck hecklers by having an extended conversation, and complaining about the pressure to deliver facsimile versions of recorded songs. The air is improvisatory, even if she’s acting through a routine, so it’s all convincingly off-the-cuff.

Moldejazz always invites an artist-in-residence, and this year’s masterstroke was to bring out a young Norwegian with a predilection for collecting multiple bands. Customarily, the guest would be an older American. Gard Nilssen’s reputation has soared in recent years, and his sequence of sets made him the true lord of the festival, presenting a different face every day. He played with sPacemoNkey (dark electronic brooding) and Bushman’s Revenge (revealing that outfit’s softer side). He invited trumpeter Ambrose Akinmusire to join Acoustic Unity, climaxing that set by having Joshua Redman step up for an ecstatic Ornette Coleman encore. He duetted with Bad Plus drummer Dave King, and guested with the Bill Frisell/Thomas Morgan duo. Nilssen’s greatest triumph was the mega-scale Supersonic Orchestra, which boasted at least three of most instruments. Freedom to split skulls, but in an organised way, as battalions formed then switched allegiances, constantly subverting the dynamic supremacy. There were a dangerous number of climaxes.

The discovery of the week was a stripling quartet from the local area, matching the extreme heaviness of massed Black Country beer-belly hard-riffers with the advantage of a math-jazz education. Recording artists on the Clean Feed label, Master Oogway attained a constant cyclic peak very quickly, repeatedly leading towards framing theme-constructions, as Håvard Nordberg Funderud’s guitar riffage broke asunder and Lauritz Lyster Skeidsvoll’s tenor saxophone meat hung loose, in a jazz rock hernia load, savagely slit and unloaded on the floor of tradition. Guitar solos climbed and descended the scuzzed frets, cutting to an asthmatic tenor brawl, with drums as sole sparring partner. Few tenormen prefer to nurture a sound that’s so full of rasp, friction and breath-sputter nowadays, such an approach being at its height in the late-1960s and all-1970s heyday of free jazz. When themes emerged, the guitar and saxophone nestled very closely, with Karl Erik Horndalsveen’s sinewy bass repeats often underpinning, the drums of Martin Heggli Mellem’s choosing a tight, dull reverb. The distance between Master Oogway and Melody Gardot illustrates the span of Moldejazz’s inspired musical range.

(Photos: Gard Nilssen by Thor Egil Leirtrø; Melody Gardot by Ole Bjørn Steinsvik)