Hedvig Mollestad is Moldejazz Festival's mighty guitar queen

Hedvig Mollestad dominates the 62nd edition of Europe’s oldest continuous jazz festival. Following the likes of Pat Metheny and Chick Corea as Moldejazz’s Artist in Residence, her growing stature is shown by the challenge of eight diverse gigs in six days, during which the hard rock-rooted improv which once defined her is only fleetingly heard. Whether duetting with mutant sax titan Colin Stetson, premiering a jazz-classical composition or leading a guitar squadron including Wilco’s Nels Cline, Mollestad’s patient attention to music’s distinctness and her playing’s understated arcs stay true. A week also packed with international and local stars is her creative coming of age.

Moldejazz sits firmly at the heart of this small Norwegian town, right from the opening street procession, when crowds ignore persistent rain to warmly cheer the local teenage marching band. Mollestad grew up on the far side of the River Molde, where mountains form a distant blue mass, and got her big break with the festival’s 2009 Young Jazz Talent award.

Liquid Borders band (above) - photo by Thor Egil Leirtrø/Moldejazz

The opening concert, Liquid Borders, is her fourth large-scale composition. It goes furthest into classical terrain, inspired by Magnetic North’s Jan Balke, on piano and synths in tonight’s tentet, and Trgyve Seim’s meditatively lovely, melancholy ECM release Different Rivers (2000). Sidsel Endresen’s recitations on the latter are the model for enigmatic English spoken-word verses which deal with isolation and its penetration. In between, saxophonist-singer Sissel Vera Pettersen’s witchy ululations provide alarming, profound female pain and anger. Her throat-rattles and clicks fall into the Geiger crackles of Mollestad’s mirroring guitar, an initially sparing presence with its pizzicato pulses and slow, balmy solos. Orchestral rock’s potential power lies dormant till the anarchic finale, Mollestad preferring structured, sometimes stilted exploration of her classical capacity. As she said beforehand, this week is about looking “for my extremes… an image of how much I can accommodate here and now”. As if to prove this, she pops up hours later at Snarky Puppy’s open-air set, bending her back in classic rock shredding.

Østerdalsmusikk Revisited sees Mollestad cover Torgrim Sollid’s Østerdalsmusikk (1975), a crucial record in Norway’s folk-based declaration of jazz independence. The album has special emotional resonance for Mollestad, whose father Lars Martin Thomassen played trumpet and flugelhorn on it and, aged 80, is here tonight. Three saxes and a trumpet enter already playing hard and wild, as if from some highland forest where Norwegian jazz’s primordial principles reside. Sissel Vera Pettersen can be seen reflected in Jon Balke’s polished Steinway as she offers more vocal glossolalia. Mollestad’s oud picks out what could be a Western movie theme, before falling away with shivering strings from Balke’s piano, Grieg-like in its bittersweet, cool romance. Zorn regular Trevor Dunn’s grinding arco on double-bass is matched by Mollestad’s guitar bow’s scimitar sawing. Often keeping herself in abeyance, she lets rip to add hard rock to this music’s unified field of Norwegian spirits.

Mollestad duets with Colin Stetson - Photo by Thor Egil Leirtrø/Moldejazz

That night in the Storyville club, Mollestad duets with Colin Stetson. The saxophonist’s pummelling arsenal of breath-transmuting pick-ups is brutally forbidding before he’s played a note, and the improvised quest for common ground is gruelling. But even when his breath brackishly backs up a spectral tune emerges, and after bothering a bass sax bell, he plays conventionally. Mollestad’s staccato blasts sound over his saurian breath, her science-fiction atmospherics meet his plaintive alto, and as she fires fuzzed-up flares, their melodies overlap. Afterwards, Stetson the sax monster shrinks to amiable normality, and Mollestad looks joyfully relieved. People crowd around the bass sax like a zoological specimen, this battered working beast’s wild danger safe now. “Meditative,” someone muses, out in the bright Norwegian night.

Weejuns, Mollestad’s new album and band with keyboardist Ståle Storløkken and drummer Ole Mofjell, brings her closer to the seething psychedelic prog-jazz of Elephant9 and Krokofant, a Norwegian cutting-edge where Storløkken is the eminence grise. Trevor Dunn’s bass is a Moldejazz addition. The noticeably younger audience is patiently attentive to music on a grand, incremental scale. Mollestad’s repeated phrases flicker like jumping film in the subtly strobing light. Storløkken hunches over his Hammond, ready to pounce, till his sustained notes press down as if generating energy, and spiral up like an inverse whirlpool. Weejuns drift into meditative passages as if to recharge, not quite becalmed. Then Mollestad headbangs to a majestic riff, her high, mind-shredding notes part of a general interstellar overdrive, Norway ’73 and now meeting in an atom-smashing warp.

Mollestad rocking out with Snarky Puppy - Photo Thor Egil Leirtrø/Moldejazz

Mollestad’s most conventional jazz setting is the quartet Cortex, whose last album, Legal Tender (2020), formed almost orchestral arrangements around rolling postbop vistas. Leader Thomas Johansson’s muted trumpet cries are met by Mollestad’s low thrums, as she waits her moment like a martial artist, seeking the point to strike with maximum impact. When she finally cuts loose, relentless, twisted beams of shrieking guitar meet Kristoffer Berre Alberts’ sax, and jazz and rock’s edges melt.

Mollestad is back at midnight for Sky Music: A Tribute to Terje Rypdal, celebrating her great guitar hero. It repeats a 2017 show with Even Helte Hermansen’s guitar, Rypdal’s frequent collaborator Storløkken, drummer Gard Nilssen and bassist Ingbrigt Håker Flaten, with Nels Cline’s stellar addition. A sepulchral Storløkken solo recalls Van der Graaf Generator’s Hugh Banton, as this Phantom of the Fjords’ premonitory flutters grow into lurid sci-fi warps, the guitar armada speed round bends, and sparks fly.

Moldejazz is about more than its industrious Artist in Residence. Kurt Elling’s SuperBlue project foregrounds his own lyrics, which are often hipster in the honourable old sense, 1970s-style R&B and low-slung funk. Blue-suited and red-faced, he stays a post-Sinatra Chicago saloon singer despite these changed surroundings. He doesn’t have a loverman or lovely voice, it’s too earthy, reedy and effortful for that. But on the intimately epic ‘Endless Lawns’, a Carla Bley tune incorporating Elling’s words with Judith Minty’s poem ‘Sailing By Stars’, the gentler mode of its cosmic philosophy of love and death brings out his limpid best. Samara Joy is meanwhile playing Molde’s biggest venue, Bjørnsonhuset, in a sail-shaped dockside hotel where the crowd jostling to enter prove the 22-year-old Grammy-winner’s very trad appeal. Her light, conversational touch suits a bossa nova. Bonding with the crowd like a stand-up, she lithely ascends and swoops, skips and scats; even her howls are gracefully inviting.

Samara Joy - Photo by Gustav Photography/Moldejazz

Marcus Miller demonstrates his jazz variety in the same hall. His composition ‘February’ is an American Songbook-style ballad mixed with Quiet Storm soul, contrasting with the classic funk of Stevie Wonder’s ‘Higher Ground’. ‘Mr. Pastorius’ was written as a Jaco tribute for Miles and has become one for Miller’s old boss. When Russell Gunn’s mute drops from his trumpet, he plays more forthrightly, showing a Milesian embrace of mistakes.

The next night ends another Miles bassist’s latest tour. “The light on the water was so beautiful, it was like music,” Dave Holland says of his morning view. His new quartet have excitingly contrasting balance, particularly between altoist Jaleel Shaw’s warmly rooted bop beauty and drummer Nasheet Waits’ sometimes martial, snare-rattling thrusts. A Shaw solo is a statement of sinuous melody, airily finding higher, sunnily joyful notes. Holland’s own solo sees him strum his double-bass like Spanish guitar, even sitar. He gives his instrument a quizzical look, as if surprised by it. It’s exciting and romantic up there, with the heavy and the light equipoised.

There’s much Norwegian beauty. Norwegian Poetry and Satire Orchestra showcases Dagfinn Nørbo, a true bohemian in kaftan and beret. His mostly humorous Norwegian poetry reaches the English listener with a gently urbane voice punctuated by wry, explosive indignance, over mordant cool jazz. Bassist Trygve Fiske leads the youthful Trondheim Jazz Orchestra in his commission Songs to SeRa. They move from urban hustle to more abstract thickets, as the characterful likes of dancing, finger-snapping trombonist Guro Kvåle solo idiosyncratically. Playful, sensual feeling studs the orchestrated flow of individual sounds with wide, natural dynamics, from a whisper to a sax scream that makes its player theatrically sag. ECM saxophonist Mette Henriette’s trio suggests a sombre midafternoon mass, at its deepest when Henriette’s steamy breath finds communion with cellist Judith Hamann’s barely bowed wooden creaks. Single notes toll and glint as Storyville’s dark, still space becomes a psychic hollow. If that sounds liturgical, Horta, Tatar veteran singer Elias Akselsen’s trio with accordionist/guitarist Stian Carstensen and fiddler Ola Kvernberg, plays music steeped in Akselsen’s Romany heritage to Molde’s packed cathedral. 

Harald Lassen’s quartet play from his new album Balans. He flips between sax, flute and piano with The Band-like ease shared by his multi-tasking outfit, with the keyboardist switching to clarinet. Sander Eriksen Nordahl plays his electric guitar and effects board like a theremin, spiriting future-folk notes with a pointed finger. An exploded, free-flowing sort of rock is followed by Floydian floating. Gentle acoustic guitar grows to grandeur, simmering down to Lassen’s single piano phrase, then a note.

Mollestad plugs back into Zeppelin heaviness with her trio in the open-air Romsdal Museum’s parkland. Then as midnight approaches on Saturday, Moldejazz concludes with her cathedral solo show. Standing at the foot of a vaulting white arch, she favours wistful introspection and insectile, experimental sounds. Guest guitarist Hans Magnus “Snah” Ryan encourages electric aggression, but Mollestad seeks other facets, singing a visceral love song (“Wear my skin, wear my bones…”), and playing Michel Legrand’s swoony ‘I Will Wait For You’. In a final coup de theatre, Kjetil Bjerkestrand shockingly riffs on the cathedral organ like a titanic Hammond. Mollestad duets and gets lost, ending her mighty week.