Nordic Jazz 08: Ola Kvernberg

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The two-day Nordic Jazz 08 festival — held on the House of Sweden's roof, overlooking the Potomac — kicks off on Thursday, and all this week readexpress.com has featured interviews with the artists performing there. We've profiled Thursday's performers: composer Kristian Blak from Denmark's Faroe Islands and Sweden's Wildbirds & Peacedrums, as well as Finland's Iro Haarla, who will lead a quintet on Friday. The final profile is on Ola Kvernberg, a violinist and hardanger fiddler who plays traditional hot jazz, electro-improvisation and Norwegian folk music with equal aplomb — and it's a dizzying modern blend. He performs with his trio on Friday.

» EXPRESS: Express 5 things we should know about Norwegian folk music.
» KVERNBERG: I find it kinda hard to list 5 specific things, since Norway has a very diverse range of local folk music traditions. But considering the musical aspects of Norwegian folk, I would say that the stuff I've checked out with tempered notes, sounding in a way slightly "off" to the Western ear, but really representing a tonal resistance that one will figure out actually was more natural in the end.

The whole concept of folk music was initially to be accessible and inviting to most people, and to include all the social aspects like singing and dancing and getting together. This fascinates me. What I'm trying to do is just as much to keep that spirit alive, to believe in music being a social happening, rather than an arrogant, egocentric showoff, which "complicated" music tends to end up being sometimes. Although, in the end, I believe that there is no such thing as "complicated" music, its only the musicians or the audience themselves who complicate it.

This leads me to what I would call my mantra: Anyone can enjoy anything, as long as they believe in the presenter's will to communicate. So what has all of this to do with folk music? The attitude. Music is something that belongs to everybody. So I would say that Norwegian folk is one strong influence together with American bluegrass, contemporary classical music, Indian and African folk music. Still, I would say that my heart is in jazz music.

» EXPRESS: Remember the following story from the Oslo Jazz Festival from 2005? The Grand Hotel's ballroom was too full to admit any more people, including a few musicians hoping to play — including you. So you whipped out your violin and held an impromptu dance session right there in the hallway. I was there and I was surprised to see so many young people breaking out the traditional Norwegian dance steps with such skill. [Shown above and at left.] Any memories from this night?
» KVERNBERG: [Laughs] Sure, I remember that night. To [have to] stand in line to participate in a jam session because chatting VIPs are taking up the space in the club is also a very typical and somehow traditional Norwegian thing.

Anyways, that night I went to the jam with my sister — who's a full-time folk music fiddler — and my brother-in-law, so what may have appeared as skilled dance steps was really my brother-in-law leading a pack of young people through what we call the "halling" — somehow the Norwegian folk equivalent to male species showing off. [Laughs] The dance exists in various forms, as solo and pair, and the climax of the dance is to kick a hat off a stick, which for each kick is lifted a little higher.

» EXPRESS: Are people taught folk dancing and music from a young age in Norway?
» KVERNBERG: Unfortunately, not for most of us. But, there's still a lot of recruiting done by small groups and people with a lot of initiative in Norway, and certain places and areas. Somehow, the bigger a valley is in Norway, the more the local tradition has been preserved and is part of the area and towns common local-patriotic pride. Along with the annual kappleik, which is a competition specialized in folk music and dance, with almost as detailed genres as the American Grammy, only this one with strictly traditional Norwegian folk.

I, for my part, competed in these competitions till I was 15, and then started playing improvised stuff and didn't really find interest in trying to play exact replicas of the what the greatest fiddlers of the old days did. Needless to say, as in all strong and proud traditions, there's a lot of conservative people with a great fright of renewal in Norwegian folk. But the past years, a lot of stuff has happened, and folk music is starting to open up from being antique-museum thing to something that actually exists today, in every way.

» EXPRESS: For being such a progressive place musically, there seems to be a lot of love in Norway for very traditional "Hot Club" jazz. Any idea why it's still so popular, especially at the Oslo Jazz Festival?
» KVERNBERG: Yes, you're right. Norway is still a very small country, and the situation of the jazz scene in Norway the past 15 years has been very interesting.
On one side, you have the ultra-traditional segment, preferring '30s-style banjo-traditional swing, and on the other side the rebels who started mixing jazz with other genres — like my label owner, Bugge Wesseltoft [of Jazzland Records] — and made jazz a wider definition of music.

The Oslo Jazz Festival has also been promoting itself as mainly a traditional festival for quite some years too, but the last couple of years it seems that they are starting to open up for new stuff.

Considering Norway as a musically progressive place, I'd like to present one of the main reasons for this: Norwegian artists have the privilege of great government funding, which basically means that given that 10 creative talents were born, all of them would hopefully … start to play themselves — or initiated by parents, of course — and every single one of them will have the opportunity to get professional training on a university, and apply for money to make their projects happen.

At the time, Norwegian politics is tending to lean to the right, and if this party — Fremskrittspartiet, the progressive party — gets the power they'll remove more or less every funding to anything that doesn't sell itself. Potentially Norway would be musically bombed back to the Stone Age and whatever colors our nation has in its identity would disappear, because musicians need money, too, you know, and Norway is an expensive country to live in.

» EXPRESS: Why did you switch the trio from a drummer-less band with a guitarist to one that includes a drummer but no guitar?
» KVERNBERG: Playing with Doug Raney — son of [influential jazz guitarist] Jimmy Raney, you know — was my school of bebop, so to say. And coming out of a Hot Club setting with distinct swing-chopping guitars, it was a natural chapter two for me to start the trio without drums.

Now, my choice to replace the guitar with drums has to do with the harmonic and tonal freedom this setting gives me. Both the piano and the guitar very much define the sound in a band, and given that my aim is to figure out new stuff, I felt I had to open up the sound a little. And this setting is also what led me to going back to some of the folk stuff I did when I was younger. Strictly [speaking], jazz violin doesn't really have a history as diverse as, for example, the saxophone, so [I wanted to fire up] a trio setting where the fiddle has to take responsibility to be much more than the instrument playing the melody and playing a couple of solos over some chords.

» House of Sweden, 2900 K. St. NW; Fri., 7:30 p.m., $25 (or $40 for both nights); 202-467-2600. (Foggy Bottom)

» Listen to tracks from the Ola Kvernberg Trio's "Night Driver" CD.
» Listen to live performances from the trio.

I'll Remember April - Ola Kvernberg Trio

Ola Kvernberg Trio - All In (live excerpt)

Trio photos by Fred Jonny Hammero; others by Christopher Porter