What happened in 1959?
To understand music, we must also learn about and from history. Johan Hauknes wants to do something about that. In his jazz history lecture during the festival, he wants to show how the period around 1959 was decisive for jazz as we know it today. He explains that what happened in 1959 came as a result of a fundamental musical desire to free oneself from the structures that at the time defined what jazz was.
Johan Hauknes says that in 1959 there were three ground-breaking records which in their own way challenged the categorization and approach to the boundaries of the jazz genre. Each of them represented a break in style and laid a foundation for the future development of improvised music. The new stylistic directions were respectively named modal jazz, with Miles Davis' "Kind of Blue", a further complication of the established hardbop with John Coltrane's "Giant Steps" and free jazz with Ornette Coleman's records in 1959 and 1960.
What they shared was a desire to restructure jazz and break with its established framework, and lay a foundation for a greater melodic freedom in the improvisations. With that, the foundation was also laid for new forms of jazz music, forms that came to characterize the program profile at the Kongsberg Jazz Festival, particularly in the 1970s. In Kongsberg, this music was called særingmusikk, in the rest of the world it was often categorized as avant-garde music. Kongsberg thus became the only place in the world where the term "særing" was considered a badge of honour.
In this new music, according to Hauknes, listening and responding - or playing each other well, as it is called in Nils Arne Eggen's godfot philosophy - became a central element.
Davis, Coltrane and Coleman's releases laid a foundation for jazz music elsewhere in the world to no longer be a copy or reproduction of an American tradition. The new approaches to the performance of improvised music, or jazz, laid the foundation for the development of distinctive, local varieties throughout the world beyond the 1960s and 1970s. Beyond the 1970s, musicians such as Terje Rypdal, Jan Garbarek and Arild Andersen and many others contributed to the creation of a unique Scandinavian expression.
- Part of the legacy after 1959 is that today we have several generations of musicians aged 55 and under who have a breadth of expression that is out of this world, emphasizes Hauknes.
- What I heard at Thursday's concert with Atomic and the Trondheim Jazz Orchestra was a result of this work. Here, the distinction between contemporary music and jazz structures was almost completely erased. In many ways, there are two traditions that have moved together.
In 1968/69, Kongsberg Jazz Festival and the New Music Association entered into a unique partnership. This collaboration led to a historic series of commissioned works in the following years. Here, the basic idea was to draw the liberated form of jazz and contemporary music closer together, and create a common platform. This year is therefore the 50th anniversary of this "Kongsberg-specific" innovation. We see the fruits of this collaboration today, concludes Hauknes.
Text: Ann-Mari Lofthus / Photo: Odd-Eirik Skjolde
