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Written in fRoots issue 286, 2007
 

KARL SEGLEM
Urbs
Ozella OZ 014 CD / NORCD 0661 (2007)

The plaintive opening tone of tenor saxist Seglem’s goat horn, blown as a breathy trumpet, is swiftly joined by a very urban clatter of Olav Torget’s deeply fuzzed guitar and Håkon Høgemo’s double-stopped hardanger fiddle over Gjermund Silset’s pumping bass guitar and Helge Norbakken’s unusual drum and percussion kit. This is the Seglem band line-up that achieved one of the few sets with good sound at Womex in Sevilla last October and received merited acclaim.
      On the face of it, this might seem to be an outpost of the Norwegian jazz which has evolved on a separate path to American jazz, and indeed it is, but it’s a very specific outpost with strong roots in the traditional music which provided the inspiration for most of the themes here. And these are musicians who well understand that music and the wider picture. Høgemo is one of the Norway’s top traditional players, and he and Seglem have for many years been collaborating in carving out a territory that for long was pretty much their own and at last seems to be gaining greater attention abroad. Silset and Norbakken constituted the rhythm section of Mari Boine’s greatest band, and guitarist Torget also plays ngoni, a crossover from his work in Solo Cissokho’s splendid Cissokho System (whose set at Førde festival’s closing party last year was a dance-galvanising triumph).
      While perhaps the commercial image of northern contemporary music is of a sort of Sigur Ros minimalism, this is a much more muscular thing, inspired by and close to traditional music and built on its natural scales and powerful dance rhythms, such as the lurching halling, blending grainy organic sound textures with subtle electronics, bridging traditional, jazz and rock music but chasing the tail of none of them; it’s a new music founded on Norwegian tradition as was American jazz on American folk music.
      www.ozellamusic.com, www.norcd.no


© 2007 Andrew Cronshaw



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