New Conception Of Jazz

Description

When Bugge Wesseltoft's New Conception of Jazz was released in 1996, no-one predicted what a hugely influential album it would turn out to be. Although it received the Norwegian Grammy award for "Jazz Album of the Year" it's real significance would emerge later, "It sold OK in Norway," said Wesseltoft. "Then six months after that people called me up from France — they really want the album, then Germany, then it just took off from there." Soon, album sales were reaching the 40,000 mark. But that was just the beginning.

Other musicians in other countries, excited by Wessoltoft's new jazz sound, began offering their take on his music. Suddenly Bugge Wesseltoft's New Conception of Jazz was at the forefront of what was quickly becoming a hip new trend. The press began calling it Nu-Jazz and among the the first wave of bands that broke in the wake of the New Conception of Jazz were Nils Petter Molvær, Wibutee, and Jaga Jazzist, who suggested this new trend had much to offer.

What Wesseltoft had done was to take the sounds and rhythms of club culture and electronica and combined them with jazz improvisation. But as we all know, having an good idea is one thing, translating it into successful reality is quite another and, as Wesseltoft is first to admit, it took time and a lot of experimentation. In the event, the successful realisation of his concept was less about the means he used to achieve his end, but more about the end he ultimately achieved, which is what New Conception of Jazz is all about — "It's my first attempt to fuse electronic music inspirations with my more organic jazz background and it took two years of heavy work, as well as learning studio recording almost from scratch and learning the 'edit and producer' role," he later reflected.

The New Conception of Jazz triggered the first important contemporary jazz trend to emanate outside the USA, demonstrating musical change in jazz need not emanate in the land of its origin, or even sound like American jazz, in order to sound "authentic." It also had the welcome effect of focussing attention on the European jazz scene as a new confidence in the home-grown product gradually became apparent as festivals, which had previously built their programmes around established American jazz stars and filling in the gaps with European bands, awoke to wealth of talent on their own doorstep. As the German publication Wegweiser Jazz noted, "There is talk in the USA of a new European assertiveness in matters jazz."

The interesting thing about the music on New Conception of Jazz is that even today, it sounds fresh and ahead of the game. Take the track "Poem," for example, where Wesseltoft places an acoustic piano in an electronic environment, a context where it sheds it association with the past and sounds of the moment, then, in a fresh episode, a synth sound emerges that brings to mind the powerful opening of Weather Report's "Birdland," then "Poem" assumes momentum with a powerful New Conception of Jazz groove with the trumpet of Nils Petter Molvær emerging as the voice of reason before an end without resolution, suggesting this not the end of the story, it will be continued.

There are two versions of "New Conception of Jazz," the first still sounding startling with its use of club culture sounds and a four-on-the-floor (sometimes called four-to-the-floor) rhythmic pattern associated with Techno and House and played here by the bass drum. It's used in conjunction with an ostinato bass riff and a snare drum pattern that quickly became a sound signature of the New Conception of Jazz. It seemed to demand a physical response in return — tapping your foot, snapping your fingers or getting up to dance and was soon reverberating across Europe, picked up by other bands, such as Italian DJ Nicola Conte's salute to Nu-Jazz on "Other Directions."

The second version of "New Conception of Jazz" has a fine Fender Rhodes piano solo by Wesseltoft that provides effective contrast to the snare drum interludes. Here, then, were two different compositions with the same title that seemed to suggest "It's the conception that matters and not song titles."

That the New Conception of Jazz was a work in progress when this album was made in 1996 is apparent with "Somewhere In Between" with Wesseltoft's falsetto vocal suggesting the "in between" was to be found "East of the sun, west of the moon." But the real in between was to be found between melody and harmony and in the rhythmic elements of the bass ostinato and drum figure patterns that became such a compelling agent of Wesseltoft's new jazz conception.

On "My Street" there's a change of mood suggestive of the tonalities we associate with music from the Middle East. It brings to mind an experience the British saxophonist Tommy Smith had as a member of bassist Arild Andersen's group (Andersen was once a mentor of a young Bugge Wesseltoft when he emerged on the Norwegian jazz scene), "Arild loves his Norwegian music," says Smith. "We play a lot of these [folkloric] songs when we tour with him, and the melodies are very strong — they've actually got a little bit of Arabic in there, I think, because of the quarter tones used, and that's unusual for Northern European indigenous music."

New Conception of Jazz did what few jazz records have ever done, and that's influence the course of jazz history — in this case the course of jazz history outside the United States. That in itself makes it a significant record. But although Wesseltoft had put the pieces of the jazz puzzle together in a new and interesting way it was just the starting point. The New Jazz Conception was refined and modified in live performance over the next few years and what emerged was spontaneously conceived jazz improvisation over subtle yet compelling rhythms that had people wanting more — when the band played in Club Blå (it's adopted home) in the industrial Grünerløkka area of Oslo, for example, it had queues of up to a thousand people wanting to hear the music and this was for a club that could only hold 400 people.

As the band began to tour abroad, queues stretching around two or three city blocks became the rule rather than the exception at venues such as the New Morning Club in Paris or Hamburg's Fabrik Club. "It was an exciting time," says Wesseltoft. "Early on it took a while — 2 or 3 years — to find the key that made it work. But when we did it was a like building a relationship between the band and the audience. I always say you have to believe in your music; if you believe in it you will succeed. It has to take some suffering, I don't have a problem with that. I've been playing live as much as I can because our music is not being played on the radio, it's not in front in the record stores, so you have to do good concerts to get an audience, but that's okay. It's fair somehow."