- Cloud Valley Music website -
- Andrew Cronshaw website -

- Andrew Cronshaw MySpace -



- Back to Reviews Introduction page -



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



You're welcome to quote from reviews on this site, but please credit the writer and fRoots.

Links:
fRoots -
The feature and review-packed UK-based monthly world roots music magazine in which these reviews were published, and by whose permission they're reproduced here.

It's not practical to give, and keep up to date, current contact details and sales sources for all the artists and labels in these reviews, but try Googling for them, and where possible buy direct from the artists.
CDRoots.com in the USA, run by Cliff Furnald, is a reliable and independent online retail source, with reviews, of many of the CDs in these reviews; it's connected to his excellent online magazine Rootsworld.com 


For more reviews click on the regions below

NORDIC        BALTIC        IBERIA (& islands)   

CENTRAL & EASTERN EUROPE, & CAUCASUS   

OTHER EUROPEAN        AMERICAS        OTHER, AND WORLD IN GENERAL


- Back to Reviews Introduction page -