These were heady times. A new order of jazz sounds was emerging from Oslo’s jazz underground, spread initially by word of mouth, as Wesseltoft’s New Conception of Jazz and Sharing and Nils Petter Molvaer’s Khmer raced to six figure album sales. Out of sight and out of mind of mainstream jazz culture, Norway had thrown a curve ball that had caught everyone by surprise.

Wesseltoft and Molvaer went on the road, taking their music out of Scandinavia and into Germany and France, «a new cutting edge,» said the French newspaper Libèration. Their remarkable success spread around Europe like wildfire and perhaps more than an earlier generation of Norwegian musicians, such as Jan Garbarek, Jon Christensen and Arild Andersen, they were responsible for putting Norway well and truly on the jazz map of the world. They even caused reverberations in the home of jazz itself, «Europeans Cut In With A New Sound and Beat,» said a major feature in The New York Times in 2001.

The excitement of those years has been captured on Wesseltoft’s recent New Conceptions of Jazz box set, documenting the best of his music from 1996, when the «new conception» idea was born, to a concert at the 2004 Montreux Jazz Festival on DVD during the band’s final year. The three CDs in the set include plenty of rare live concert material with the band getting into some serious grooves. «I show tracks that I am happy with and also different areas of the music,» he says. «Basically I had this idea that I wanted to use electronics and jazz improvising, using repeating rhythms from electronic music and try to find a more organic approach, mixing it all together and seeing where it led.»

The band, with its widely-imitated ostinato acoustic bass pattern – check out «Sunshine» on Nicola Conte’s album «Other Directions», for example – are caught at their peak, especially on a series of previously unreleased live dates in Japan. Yet it comes as something of a revelation to learn that these pieces, with their discursive opening sections leading into improvisations that seemed to float above the rhythms as they gradually built in intensity, were all spontaneously conceived. It is in fact, time-no-changes jazz, the implicit rhythms disguising the fact that whatever harmonic twists or turns Wesseltoft’s musical lines of enquiry took, it needed the open ears of Ingerbrigt Håker Flaten on acoustic bass and DJ Jonas Lönna to follow him. «Well, I am very proud to call myself a jazz musician,» explains Wesseltoft.

«We never talked about anything. It was all happening live, the point is I love improvising, I want to create the music with the audience. I think we only ever had two rehearsals. There was one rehearsal in 1997, and then there was one in 2007 when we had a 10-year concert doing some of the old tracks from the first album. And that was it – everything developed live.»

The New Conceptions box set is an important documentation that adds significantly to the three albums Wesseltoft cut with his New Conception of Jazz during the band’s lifetime. «My first album, «The New Conception of Jazz» from 1996, was a little bit like a laboratory, trying out different things,» he recalls. «Then I formed a group and we started playing concerts and from there it developed naturally. All the music we developed was based on ideas that worked in live performance; we were jamming, so we used the material that worked on the second album «Sharing» [from 1998]. After that we started to travel a lot, and the group became saxophone, keyboards, DJ, bass and drums, a smaller combination and more focused on concentrating on electronic rhythms. We really did a lot of concerts, tours, everything. «Moving» [from 2001] for me is the most successful album in terms of how we sounded – organic jazz, and an organic ‘flow’ in what we were doing.»

When Wesseltoft speaks of an «organic flow,» it’s easy to see what he means. Looking back at his live concerts during those years, there was always a buzz of expectation and excitement in his audiences and he seemed to feed off this energy as he developed each set. He always had his keyboards set-up so he could face the audience. He seldom looked down but stood over them, hovering, looking intently out at his audience as he tried out musical ideas. Maybe he’d set-up a riff or melodic motif and if the audience responded (he almost always played for dancers or if they were seated they’d soon be up dancing) he’d keep on developing the idea until the whole dance floor was moving and pulsating in time to his music, which seemed to swell and grow in stature in tandem with the audience response.xx «There are many elements; one of them is not to push people too hard in the beginning – get the feel, where are we now, what is the actual energy – right now,» he explains. «So when you walk on stage you don’t start with something edgy. For me it’s trying to get everyone involved, because when it’s successful it’s a really beautiful feeling.»

As a result of his success nu-jazz bands began emerging around Europe, such as Germany’s Trance Groove, France’s Julien Lourau and the group noJazz (who were helped on their way by the incredible success of DJ Ludovic Navarre’s St Germain whose huge hit Tourist went into seven figures), Finland’s RinneRadio, while in the UK, Andy Sheppard’s Nocturnal Tourist was one of just a few UK responses to the music. But out front was Wesseltoft’s New Conception of Jazz, although today he prefers to avoid the nu-jazz moniker. «Somehow I never felt comfortable with the nu-jazz tag,» he reflects. «We were purely improvising, other groups [in the nu-jazz years] were doing rehearsals and writing down songs and working out a plan on each song, which we never did. So I’m not happy with the nu-jazz tag; some of it was interesting, and a lot was not so interesting.» But of course, history is constructed around the winners and as the disembodied voice on the track «Sharing», from Wesseltoft’s second album from 1998, says: «Somewhere there is another way of thinking.» It’s something that you are left in no doubt about after listening to the New Conception of Jazz box set. «I think the years 1999 to 2003 were the most important years for the New Conception of Jazz,» Wesseltoft says. «We were heavily involved in the live situation creating spontaneous music. We had found the key to how to make this kind of music work, how to take electronic rhythms and make them organic and build the music up and down to make things happen. They were exciting times.»

However, after almost 10 years of constant touring, Wesseltoft decided to wind up the New Conception and re-charge his batteries. «Basically, after a decade with The New Conception of Jazz I got kind of tired of the massive sound and somehow the format gradually became limiting for me,» he says. «I wanted something more open. At the same time I had got myself a grand piano and that leads to the ‘acoustic piano thing’ because as a piano player, at some stage you have to do a solo piano album. So, of course, some say you have to do a ‘standards’ solo piano album, but that’s not for me at the moment. I really wanted to move with a solo piano album and also challenge myself on stage. There I’m obviously all alone, not dependent on anyone else, it was the challenge I needed, and for the last three years I have just basically been doing solo piano concerts.»

Wesseltoft’s solo piano debut on record came two years ago with «IM»: thoughtful, intense and with a hint of dark-side-of-the-moon lyricism it represented the beginning of a path he would follow with his customary zeal and originality. «The first album was a bit of laboratory work in the studio, trying out different ideas,» he reflects.

His latest solo album «Playing» has just been released and represents the second chapter of his journey in search of the inner man.

«It is built on what I am doing live. It is very difficult to do something as quiet as this album, and when you walk on stage you really have to believe that it will work. Sometimes, when you want people to experience something it is very often about trusting yourself, which I’m getting better at. The ultimate for me is jazz improvisation, a unique art form in the sense that it is probably the only art form that happens right there and then. So this is what I want to do live, to be as open as possible and try and create the energy and the form and the dynamic structures I create just with the audience and the energy that is somehow in the house.»Wesseltoft’s albums are all released on the Jazzland record label, which he founded back in 1996. Setting up his own record label was a major step for the then unknown artist. But he had a sure sense of himself and confidence in his music. It is typical of his energy and vision that it is now Norway’s most successful jazz label with an impressive roster of artists and back catalogue. «In 1996 when I decided to form my own label it was not possible to reach out of Norway with jazz labels, it was only Jan Garbarek and Arild [Andersen] who travelled to play outside of Norway,» he says. «At the same time there was a really interesting scene in Oslo with Audun Kleive, Eivind Aarset, Nils Petter, and I include myself, mingling with the electronic music. At the time I didn’t trust any Norwegian jazz label because it wouldn’t lead anywhere; some people end up with 200 copies [of an album] and a small notice in a Norwegian newspaper and that was that – it’s true!

«So I made an agreement, I made a label, under Polygram, at the time, because I had a couple of friends working there and they promised to bring the album out. At the time all types of music were a problem to sell [outside Norway]; today it’s easy with jazz coming out of Norway, the best time ever, but not then. So I made the label, released the album, and suddenly we started to get phone calls from France – they had released the album there and people said it sounded fresh and different and they wanted to hear me live. Fantastic!» «It started to play out, in 1997 we went to Germany and then there was a French tour in 1998, and on the label I released four albums a year; originally I asked my best friends, Eivind Aarset [«Electronique Noire»], Audun Kleive [«Bitt»] and Jon Balke [«Saturation»] and by then Nils Petter had his own career [with ECM] and in 1998/1999 younger people started to call me up and the first band we recorded from a younger generation was Wibutee with Håkon Kornstad [on tenor saxophone]. They were really young and talented people who had come through Trondheim. It was a group, I think influenced by our electronic stuff, from this scene in Oslo, which was really important. Then a lot of labels started up including Small Town Supersound and Rune Grammofon, there was good stuff happening, it was a good period.» Today, Jazzland’s catalogue boasts a wide range of artists and music, from the extraordinary voice of the dynamic Sami vocalist Mari Boine to the hugely talented violinist Ola Kvernberg.

Wesseltoft’s latest venture is another forward-thinking endeavour called «Gube», an on-line record shop. «There used to be local music stores around, people working in the store recommending us to listen to this, listen to that – it was the heart of the music business,» he says.

«But then at some stage big stores came in and the little stores went, and they lost the heart of the music business, they lost the people who really loved music. But there’s a lot of people who still love music, but a lot of them give up, trying to find the music they want. I’m trying to create a place where a certain kind of audience can trust what we are offering, they can give it a try and if they like it they can buy it.

«I read that 95 per cent of what is on iTunes has never sold one single copy! It’s shocking, it shows we need selected music stores, we need that kind of recommendation, selecting music for the audience and promoting it, letting people get into it. It’s not for everyone, of course, it’s for people who like our type of music, not only jazz, it will be assorted music, music that I love but listener-orientated giving every album, every artist, every label a reputation. You can read about things, and also we’ll be going in the opposite direction to worse-and-worse download sound quality compared to CD quality sound. I believe people will [ITAL] pay for good music.»Fifteen years ago, the New Conception of Jazz was born, but what is the Future Conception of Jazz today? «For me personally, I am really into this solo piano thing at the moment,» Wesseltoft says. «I’m really pleased with my latest album «Playing» and for the future I’d like to do different projects with different people. As for jazz in general, I think electronic possibilities are becoming more and more alive today and will definitely be part of future jazz. Being able to introduce loops for example, that’s a nice way of improvising, I can play something on the piano, record it live on my laptop, accompany myself, create something there and then with electronics, that’s the future of the music. But I think we are only at the beginning of electronic possibilities; it’s still a new thing and will be important in the future. Wynton Marsalis might try and stop it, but luckily you can’t stop progress - that was a joke, by the way.»
Tekst: Stuart Nicholson
Foto: Ann Iren Ødeby