King Arild of the Silver City
HM The King has appointed musician Arild Andersen, Oslo, as Commander of the Royal Norwegian Order of St. Olav. We congratulate! Here you can read Arild's journey in the world of bass and jazz penned by Johan Hauknes. This was written in connection with Arild's 75th birthday!
Text: Johan Hauknes/Photo: Nina Djærff
In 16, a 17-1962-year-old guitarist from Strømmen outside Oslo discovered a bit of the double bass's beauty and possibilities. This happened when the permanent bass player in a young, local band from the area around Strømmen and Lillestrøm had to throw in the towel due to large water blisters. He never gave the bass position back. Almost sixty years later, the young guitarist is known far beyond Strømmen and Norway, but it is not the guitar that his name is associated with. To a large international music audience, he is known as a bass player, for this audience his name is now synonymous with a bass player in the very top international jazz league.
Around the time when young Arild Andersen picked up a bass, he saw an American television program in the series Jazz Scene USA. The then 27-year-old bassist Gary Peacock played with Shorty Rogers & his Giants at a CBS studio in Hollywood. Arild Andersen was fascinated, not only "… [he] could hear every note Gary Peacock played". Peacock “played much more freely than anything I had heard before. I had never experienced this before", commented Andersen recently after a reunion with the programme. "I was 17 years old, dropped the guitar and wanted to make the bass sound"!
That's where it started. A professional bassist's life that has lasted almost 60 years and is still developing. If there is one thing that is certain, it is that Andersen has made the bass sound. In his hands the bass sings with a powerful and bell-like voice. With a playing style that is immediately recognisable, he has made the double bass a solo instrument fully in line with the more traditional solo instruments in improvised music. He produces the sound of new and modern jazz music, with clear roots in tradition.
In the beginning was the bass In 1964, Arild Andersen and several others in the jazz milieu in Oslo, both young and somewhat older, had their ears thoroughly cleaned when, on 12 April, they sat down in the University's Aula on Karl Johans gate to listen to bassist Charles Mingus' Jazz Workshop for two overwhelming, hour-long sets. This concert left a deep impression on many of the audience in the Aula, including the young bassist.
If we are to set a starting point for Andersen's professional career, it must be this year. This year Andersen became a member of an Oslo-based jazz piano trio. Twenty-year-old pianist Roy Hellvin led the band, while the band's oldest man, 23-year-old Svein "Chrico" Christiansen, played drums. The 18-19-year-old former guitarist from Strømmen was no longer a guitarist who also played bass. He was now a bass player who also played guitar.
At the same time, he began this year as a student in the engineering studies in electronics and electrical engineering at Oslo Tekniske Skole, later the Oslo College of Engineering. "Anyone who has not listened to a tone with a frequency of 100 Hz from a tone generator" has not learned to listen, he can say. The lessons he learned from his engineering studies may never be useful as a practicing engineer. But you don't have to have talked much with Arild Andersen before you realize that parts of the knowledge he gained from the school desk and the laboratory have been used, expanded and synthesized.
Laboratory tasks were a natural and integral part of the study for the aspiring engineers. It soon turned out that the competent laboratory manager at the school was a young man from Kongsberg. The head of the lab would also turn out to be interested in jazz. He was among the very first to wear the civil servant's staff blowerjacket with the specially made badge for the jazz club Jazz Evidence on the chest during the Kongsberg jazz festival. His name dares to be well known to the vast majority of people who know their Kongsberg festival history, Per Ottersen.
But Ottersen's strong interest in jazz did not come at the expense of his demands for the engineering students' lab work. When the young student Arild Andersen asked to be excused from the electro-lab in order to attend a jazz practice, the answer from the lab manager was an authoritative "No!". It was out of the question! Even if it was music that could lift his own festival in the future.
1967: Kongsberg debut with a bang Despite the lack of rehearsals, Per Ottersen and Kongsberg hired the jazz festival Roy Hellvin Trio as festival comp at the end of June 1967. The trio was in place when the third Kongsber festival was to open, with the young engineering student Andersen on bass, although he did not make it to all the rehearsals.
Arild Andersen thus made his concert debut at the Kongsberg Festival in 1967. During the opening concert on Thursday 29 June 1967, Roy Hellvin's Trio was presented, in the then 18-month-old cinema on Nymoens Torg. Incidentally, on the same day as one of the favorites of many of those who used to go to this cinema, the film actress Jayne Mansfield, died in a car accident.
But then: On Sunday 2 July 1967, at the very last concert of the festival, the 30-year-old American trumpeter Carmell Jones play. The Roy Hellvin Trio was assigned the task of being the accompaniment - or 'comp' as it was called in jazz parlance - for Carmell Jones.
As far as it is possible to judge in retrospect, not only Jones' meeting with Kongsberg, but also his meeting with the "Oslo comp", must have turned out well. A contemporary newspaper report says that "Carmell opened with 'Caravan' with a technique and tone that took the audience's breath away, but which was impressively followed up by the Norwegian musicians". Carmell Jones wasn't just happy with comps, he "became." inspired of the accompaniment" according to this reviewer.
Carmell Jones seems to have been very excited, so much so that he wrote a new suite for the occasion. This suite, which he called "Kongsberg Suite no. 1", was performed at the end of the closing cinema concert. With that, it was also the end of the entire 1967 festival.
Randi Hultin had no doubt that Carmell Jones was the festival's favourite. She thought he excelled with "magnificent playing, [the cinema concert was] a wonderful piece of chamber jazz in three sections". Roy Hellvin's trio confirmed, in Hultin's opinion, the impression from "the opening concert, ... there can be no doubt that they have conquered a prominent place in Norwegian jazz life".
Roy Hellvin's trio with the now 21-year-old bassist Arild Andersen also played at the jam, the three musicians were frequent guests in Bykroa. Here the three young people played, among other things, with the valve trombonist Frank Phipps, with the trumpeter Carmell Jones, with Karin Krog, but also with the biggest draw at the 1967 festival. This attraction was him who, with his up to 6 or 7 horns and instruments, without modesty, liked to present himself as "the reed section".
The patch's name was Roland Kirk and he could, all alone, shine more brightly than many complete woodwind ranks. After playing with Arild Andersen at the jam, Roland Kirk was also, according to VG's emissary, "very excited about Arild Andersen's bass accompaniment". "Yes - he would actually rather play with the Norwegian bassist than with the more famous Niels Henning Ørsted Pedersen!", said the writer.
Roy Hellvin's trio thus made a very positive impression at the 1967 festival. When Randi Hultin in Dagbladet thought the jams were the highlight of the festival, it was not least due to this trio's contribution. When Hultin believed that the trio had "conquered a prominent place in Norwegian jazz life" with their playing, VG's writer completely agreed, the trio was described in VG as "the big positive surprise of the festival".
The three members of the festival comp at Kongsberg in 1967, Roy Hellvin, Svein "Chrico" Christiansen and Arild Andersen, cannot in any way be said to have disappointed these writers' implicit expectations for their musical development in the following decades.
A pillar at Kongsberg The main arena for the concerts at the 1967 festival, the Kongsberg cinema - colloquially called "Sitronpressa" - became a pillar in the Kongsberg jazz festival's history for a total of fifty years after it was inaugurated in December 1965. The 21-year-old who made his Kongsberg debut in the cinema in 1967, the year after the new cinema itself made its festival debut, today has almost as central a place in the festival's history as this cinema.
It has subsequently proved difficult to determine how many gigs Arild Andersen has actually had at the Kongsberg Jazz Festival since his debut. But there is little doubt that he is the musician who, in the years since, has had the most gigs at the Kongsberg jazz festival. In 1993, the Kongsberg jazz festival itself marked, with a gift presentation, that Arild Andersen had passed what they then estimated to be at least 50 gigs. Based on this, we can today conservatively estimate that Arild Andersen has at least been involved some sixty concerts during the 53 jazz festivals since its opening in 1967.
I cannot mention all of these concerts in this review of Arild Andersen's life at Kongsberg, but I will mention some of those that stand out as the most influential. I will refer to concerts that in a particular way seem to illuminate, or otherwise illustrate, the development of Andersen's long career as an international musician and his importance to the development of Norwegian jazz after his debut in 1967.
The 1968s, 1969 and Sonny Rollins… Already the year after his debut, Arild Andersen was back at Kongsberg, the Roy Hellvin Trio had once again been given the job as festival accompanist also in 1968. This year's festival was to be a very active festival for young Andersen, with five concerts during the four days of the festival lasted.
This time the trio played three festival concerts as accompaniment for wind instruments. First there were two cinema concerts with respectively Lucky Thompson og Jesper Thilo, both on tenor saxophone. In addition, the young trio played a concert with the young saxophone talent Carl Magnus "Calle" Neumann. Andersen also played with Arild Boman's ensemble this year. He played in Boman's work «Interlude – Conversation between instruments», a work which was a precursor to and introduction to a multi-year and fruitful collaboration between the Kongsberg jazz festival and the association nyMusikk.
Arild Andersen was also on the concert program on 6 July 1968 Karin Krog's quartet. During this concert, the quartet performed, among other things, Thelonious Monk's "'Round About Midnight" and the Beatles song "Day Tripper", with two basses in the band. The band consisted of "Chrico" on drums, Arild Andersen and Palle Danielsson on bass and Karin Krog on vocals. You can also listen to the recording of the Monk song from this concert on Karin Krog's sparkling 1968 album "Joy".
Early in the autumn of this year, Andersen was contacted for the first time by Jan Garbarek. Garbarek wanted Arild in his quartet. Arild Andersen thus took over Per Løberg's bass position in Garbarek's quartet this autumn. Not only that, this autumn Arild Andersen was also asked to play with Don Cherry himself, at the Berlin festival in November 1968.
Just over a month after the very first moon landing, it was time for a new festival at Kongsberg, at the end of August 1969. Arild Andersen was then no longer a member of what had now become Roy Hellvin's quartet. By contrast, Andersen was now, at Garbarek's request, involved Jan Garbarek's Quartet. Of course, this quartet also played at the festival this year. In addition, Andersen contributed to Arild Boman's work «Ecumene», the first commissioned work created in collaboration between the association nyMusikk and Kongsberg jazz festival.
That same autumn, Andersen played with Don Cherry again. Jan Garbarek's quartet, with Terje Rypdal and Jon Christensen, supplemented by multi-artist Sidsel Paaske played with Don Cherry in October 1969.
With this, Andersen was firmly rooted in the music that, later in the 1970s, would place the Kongsberg Jazz Festival as the most important Norwegian festival for innovative and avant-garde music, the festival for "special" music. Arild Andersen became, for many of us who were young in the 1970s, one of the exponents of the music we loved, the one who in the following years could proudly refer to ourselves as "odds". With this, Andersen became one of us. After this, Arild Andersen was part of what made Kongsberg one of the few places in the world where the term "odd" was not an insult, but was received as a self-evident and obvious compliment. At least for some of us.
Andersen had by this time gained much learning and insight from Don Cherry, and also from another great master, George Russell. Not least he learned through Russell's course on Russell's theories on tonal gravity, what he called "The Lydian Chromatic Concept". In 1970, Andersen had also been a member of George Russell's sextet.
During the 1971 festival at Kongsberg, Andersen was present in the church during the performance of George Russell's commissioned work "Listen to the Silence». This year, Arild Andersen was also supposed to play Festival big band, a big band composed of the best of young Norwegian jazz musicians. Dizzy Gillespie was hired as an authoritative and instructive leader, as a supervisor and conductor. A unique learning opportunity. But when the rehearsals for Russell's commissioned work collided with the rehearsals for the Festival big band, Andersen had to call in a substitute for Gillespie's big band rehearsals and concert. The substitute's name was Niels Henning Ørsted Pedersen.
Per Ottersen's and his cronies' big scoop this year was up for grabs Sonny Rollins to Kongsberg. Two years earlier, in 1969, Rollins had disappeared from all radar screens. For two whole years, no one knew where he had gone. In DownBeat's June 1971 issue, the editor of this magazine therefore called for Sonny Rollins, with a large picture on the cover, along with the text "WANTED!!! Sonny Rollins". Any information that could lead to the wanted person's arrest would be rewarded.
Festival manager Per Ottersen and PR manager Kjell Gunnar Hoff were able to proudly telegraph to DownBeat's editors in mid-June 1971 that they knew where Sonny Rollins was. He was already in place at Kongsberg. Sonny Rollins had been allowed to borrow the Sangerheimen in Gruveåsen, where he was supposed to play in shape after his "woodshedding". For the concert in the cinema at Kongsberg at the end of June 1971.
It is true that by this time the festival had decided to stop hiring individual musicians and give them "festival comps". One would rather book established groups or musician-initiated bands. But Sonny Rollins insisted on getting backing from a local comp. The reason for this could of course have been that Rollins thought this would lower expectations for the concert somewhat, and thus give him more room to "find his soul" again after his sabbatical.
He got a local comp, but it was a comp with more nerve and presence than he might have expected. The trio he brought with him had Bobo Stenson on piano, Arild Andersen on bass and Jon Christensen on drums. Less than two months earlier, the same trio had recorded the record "Underwear" for Manfred Eicher's new label ECM, a record that still today shows us some of the energy that lay in this trio at the time. This energy is also visible in the NRK recording of this Sonny Rollins concert in 1971.
Because no one would think afterwards that this was a pickup band - "Do you guys calypso?", asked Rollins when the concert started, and started with his own "St. Thomas". The life and power of the music oozes out of the television screen from the NRK recording, to the great delight of those of us who did not get to experience the concert.
Sonny Rollins had a "musical content with musical authenticity and authority [with] a weight 'inside' the game. It was rhythmically easy, but not superficial," said Arild Boman in Fremtiden. Compet was from the front, both as background and as foreground! Sonny Rollins had definitely found his soul again!
Mentor Andersen in-action At this point in time, the almost 26-year-old Andersen was well established as an internationally recognized Norwegian bassist within modern jazz. He had been on the first two Norwegian jazz albums that received considerable international attention. The albums "George Russell presents The Esoteric Circle" and "Afric Pepperbird", both with Jan Garbarek's quartet, with Andersen, Terje Rypdal and Jon Christensen, received a lot of attention after they were released around the turn of 1970-71.
Andersen had also appeared on Finnish Edward Vesala's 1970 album "Nana", in Vesala's trio with saxophonist Juhani Altonen. Robin Kenyatta's "Girl From Martinique" was recorded for ECM with Andersen in place at the Bauer studio in Ludwigsburg in October 1970. The already mentioned trio album "Underwear" with Bobo Stenson's trio was recorded in May 1971, the Quintet album "Sart" - also for ECM – had been recorded the previous month, with Jan Garbarek's quartet augmented by Bobo Stenson.
Andersen spent part of the period from 1972 to 1974 in New York, both to familiarize himself with the music scene there and to make new acquaintances. After returning home, the then 28-year-old Norwegian bass player with broad international experience established his first band under his own name. The following years were to Arild Andersen Quartet be synonymous with some of the qualitatively very best Norwegian jazz had to offer.
The young Nestor hired the tenor saxophonist, who was 17 days younger Knut Riisnæs. He also took two very young and very talented musicians with him, the two 19-year-olds Jon Balke on the piano and Paul Thowsen on drums. Dream Team they said about the American Olympic basketball team in 1992. But if there was something in Norwegian jazz in the mid-1970s that was the dream team for us weirdos, it was Arild Andersen's quartet.
Already at the end of June 1974, the new quartet was in place at Kongsberg, during what the festival organization marked as the 10th festival. And what a festival it was! Art Ensemble of Chicago og Thad Jones/Mel Lewis- the big band was in place. Sonny Rollins was back, this time with his own band, with Rufus Harley on unforgettable bagpipes! And so, Arild Andersen Quartet.
The concerts with Andersen's quartet, first the original one in 1974, and then in 1976 with the reconfigured quartet with Juhani Altonen on saxophone and Lars Janson on the piano, is still strongly in the back of this writer's mind as a brilliant reminder of a great period in Norwegian jazz.
The concert at Kongsberg in 1974 with the Arild Andersen Quartet starts an important line in Arild Andersen's career. Here, for the first time, his preoccupation with promoting younger promising and established musicians, with great potential and a strong individual expression, is revealed. Through this collaboration, Arild Andersen also developed his own bass playing and compositional work to new heights. He could easily be the leader, but the game was always prominent. In the game, the egalitarian aspect, the equality of the players, was always important. Play, just like free improvisation, is the ultimate democratic ideal.
Andersen has continued the mentor line up to the present day. It was just as visible in Arild Andersen's quartet in 1974, as it is in his current quartet with Helge Lien, Marius Neset, with the two drum alternatives Gard Nilssen and Håkon Mjåset Johansen. He still creates magically beautiful music in collaboration with other – often younger – musicians. Arild Andersen is a musician who is still playfully developing, always curious, always with overflowing joy at the moments when the music "takes off" and flies on its own. Arild Andersen's broad smile when the music is playing is like the fulfillment of every photographer's wet dream.
Summer Poem In 1977 we had the pleasure of experiencing Radka Toneff his quintet at Kongsberg, with Lars Jansson, Jon Eberson and Jon Christensen, together with Andersen. This was Toneff's big breakthrough, and the music she created then and in the next five years will forever shine in Norwegian jazz history.
Until 1980, Arild Andersen no longer stood out as a Norwegian jazz musician of international renown. Now he fully established himself as an international musician, an international musician who retained his Norwegian base.
In 1980, he was back at Kongsberg with an international quartet under his own name, the composition can probably make most people's mouths and ears water: Steve Dobrogosz on the piano, Kenny Wheeler on flugelhorn and trumpet and Paul Motian on drums. A quintet that we also got to know on the ECM album "Lifelines".
After this international visit in 1980, Andersen was back at Kongsberg in June 1983. Once again, this time he initiated a new and brilliant chapter in Norwegian jazz history, and it was almost a foregone conclusion that it happened at Kongsberg. This year, a completely new and unknown band came to the festival. It was the hire that Jon Christensen/Arild Andersen quintet, but we were soon to learn to know it under a completely different name.
When Arild Andersen's new quintet left Kongsberg after the concert, they went almost straight to Rainbow Studio and recorded what became their first of a total of four LPs. The first album was released on the Odin label later in 1983, and Wayne Shorter's song "Masqualero" became the title track. After that, the new Norwegian superquintet was only known by this name.
The band Masqualero with Jon Christensen, Arild Andersen and Jon Balke, along with the two new voices, Tore Brunborg on saxophone and Nils Petter Molvær on trumpet, the next few years were to set completely new standards for how modern Norwegian jazz should sound. This quintet represents an era in Norwegian jazz history.
Masqualero was back as a quartet at Kongsberg for the last time in 1990. After 1992, Masqualero was history.
The international star bassist In the meantime between the two performances of Masqualero, Arild Andersen had been at Kongsberg with a trio that many remember with pleasure. The trio concert in 1986 was a concert close to the source where a long-standing collaboration between Andersen and a young and relatively unknown guitarist had begun. This year, Andersen was also present at Kongsberg Alphonse Mouzon on drums and the guitarist Frode Alnæs. Frode Alnæs from Kristiansund was probably not particularly familiar with most of the oddities before the concert. The following year, he was also to help start a Norwegian musical adventure with roots in the guitarist's hometown, but this was an adventure that probably also unfolded somewhat outside of the oddball's primary area of interest.
But before the adventure Dance with a Stranger, Alnæs thus placed himself safely and firmly in the jazz consciousness through his collaboration with Arild Andersen in this 1986 trio. If Alnæs was not yet among the stars of the særingen, the drummer and percussionist Alphonse Mouzon had his særingen alibi in order.
Mouzon had not only been involved in the very first avant-garde period of Weather Report. Because it was with his contributions to McCoy Tyner's quartet and his visit to Kongsberg with this group in 1973 that Mouzon really became an oddball favourite. Tyner's quartet played the suite "Enlightenment" on tour this summer. This suite was later released on record, with recordings from the quartet tour's concert in Montreux, only a week after the concert in Sitronpressa. This album can thus give you an idea of how it sounded in the Kongsberg cinema in 1973, when the McCoy Tyner Trio visited.
Arild Andersen had Mouzon with him for the very first time at his commissioned concert in Molde in 1981, a concert that was released on the ECM album "A Molde Concert", ECM 1236. Arild Andersen's trio with Mouzon and Alnæs has unfortunately never been released on record, so our concert memories are the only thing left alive today.
There is an obvious and intense connection between Andersen's bass playing and a wide range of tonal cues drum storage, such as Jon Christensen, Pål Thowsen, Alphonse Mouzon, Paolo Vinaccia, Patrice Héral and John Marshall. A dialogue that is also continued in collaboration with young Norwegian drummers today, such as Thomas Strønen, Gard Nilssen and Håkon Mjåset Johansen. And not least this was evident in Andersen's collaboration with Brazilian Nana Vasconcelos. There is nothing that has made Arild Andersen's broad grin become even wider than a playful, often mutually teasing, communication and an interaction with one of these excellent drummers. It is not for nothing that Andersen's broad smile must be something close to the world's most photographed grin.
There is an almost equally long list of Andersen's collaborations and dialogues with guitarists. Andersen's playing style is also almost guitar in its sonority, impact and playful dance. An early fellow musician on guitar was of course Terje Rypdal, while together they discovered and developed the possibilities of the new jazz in the Norwegian musical soil in the years after 1967. But also this: he himself started as a guitarist in his pure youth, before he allowed himself to be captured by the deep mysteries of the basin. That is perhaps why the communication and closeness between guitarists such as Frode Alnæs and Bill Frisell has such a strong effect on the listener. Not least clearly, the link between Andersen and guitarists became clear in 1991, when Arild Andersen was once again in place at Kongsberg with Nana Vasconcelos and Ralph Towner. For posterity, it is good to know that this trio is captured on one record. The album "If You Look Far Enough", ECM 1493, can give an impression of how it sounded on stage in 1991.
... and the bass sings behind In 2009, Arild Andersen was invited to Kongsberg for who knows when. At this time, the term "The Belleville Trio» expression of a well-known and dear favorite for many of us. The trio's informal name was taken from Andersen's residency in September 2007 at the small club in Mariboes gate in Oslo, this annex to Cosmopolite in Møllergata which housed the first permanent National jazz scene. The trio with Tommy Smith on saxophone and Paolo Vinaccia on drums and percussion was firmly anchored in the consciousness of many with this residency. In the years that followed, the Belleville Trio was perhaps Andersen's most important platform for musical practice.
With him to Kongsberg in 2009, Andersen brought the Belleville trio, reinforced with the Danish pianist Carsten Dahl, a musician he had previously collaborated with on several occasions in previous years, not least in a trio with Patrice Heral.
The cinema concert in 2009 was reviewed by the undersigned for Jazznytt. Under a picture of a broadly grinning Arild Andersen, the conclusion read; "This was a concert that will be talked about for a long, long time in Kongsberg history. Roll the dice? No, of course we do not engage in such simplistic and stupid things in Jazznytt. But this time I wish we did. This wasn't just 6. This was a full house, Yatzy, and four of a kind. Everything at once!". I'll be honest, the concert still rings occasionally in my inner ear.
For the anniversary festival in 2014, Kongsberg Jazz Festival almost naturally wanted Arild Andersen in place. When you had to organize an anniversary gala for the 50th festival, "... it was only natural that [the program makers of the Kongsberg jazz festival] turned to bassist Arild Andersen" it was said in the program this year. With Bob Stenson, Billy hart og Bendik Hofseth - and with Joshua Redman as a guest - there was a party and speed in the old cinema.
There was also a party in Smeltehytta a year later when Andersen played a duo with the Kongsberg bassist Christian Meaas Svendsen. If Andersen is the king of the Silver City, Meaas Svendsen must be counted as the bass prince. A terrific concert that ended with twice Johann Sebastian Bach. When Arild Andersen finished with the second part of the minuet movement in Bach's cello suite no. 1, many special hearts beat hard.
After Arild Andersen had turned 70 in October 2015, the bassist was invited back again in 2016. This time he was presented with newly written music and new versions of earlier music, written and arranged for the Oslo-based big band now called Oslo Jazz Ensemble. At the time, the ensemble was known by its former name, Ensemble Denada. The collaboration between Andersen and Denada was given the designation Arinada, and the project was successful at home and abroad the following year, with concerts including at Ronnie Scott's in London. But it was at Kongsberg that it all started in 2016.
Or really, it supposedly started at the club Drom in the East Village in New York, on June 12, 2011. After their contribution the previous days at the Rochester festival in the far north of New York state, Ensemble Denada and Arild Andersen's group were each going to hold concerts at Drom . Due to major delays after canceled flights back to New York, they had the opportunity to attend each other's concerts during what was supposed to be a presentation of Norwegian jazz. It was after these concerts that the idea was born, the idea to do something together. Five years later they stood together on stage in the Kongsberg music theatre.
The king of the silver city in place in 2020 After Arinada in 2016, the next Kongsberg stop for Arild Andersen is during this year's Jazz Weekend 20-22. November. Andersen's 75th birthday will be marked here. Arild Andersen is back at Jazz Weekend's opening concert on Friday 20 November Kongsberg Music Theatre with a dream team put together especially for the occasion. With the saxophonist Trygve Seim, the guitarists George "Jojje" Wadenius og Frode Alnæs, as well as with Thomas Strønen on drums, next to Arild Andersen, it's guaranteed to be a party in the living room, or rather, it will be party in the theatre.
On Saturday, there are many of us who are also in place in Energimølla to hear the bassist in concert with Morten Qvenild og Gard Nilssen. Be there or be damned!
In conclusion, it is worth pointing out that neither Andersen's commissioned work for Vossa Jazz in 1990, "Sagn", nor his commissioned work for Nattjazz in 1993, "Arv", have been performed at the Kongsberg jazz festival. Therefore, these works are not discussed here either, even though they are obviously central and supporting elements in the building that together make up Arild Andersen's artistry. Perhaps we are facing one of the Kongsberg Festival's by far biggest sins of omission?
In any case, we congratulate Arild Andersen on his 75th birthday, and look forward to new meetings with the nestor, mentor and master from Strømmen, from Norway and from the world. At Kongsberg, in Oslo, or anywhere else in the world.