Read excerpts from Lars Elling's book about Kongsberg current Stian Carstensen
Below you can read a sample from Lars Elling's book about Stian Carstensen as a warm-up the duo's festival conversation and Carstensen's concert with The Horta project in Kongsberg Church.
Kongsberg Jazzfestival friend, artist and author Lars Elling is current with a recent and critically acclaimed book about the musical unique Stian Carstensen. We asked Lars Elling if he could offer the Kongsberg Jazz audience a taste of the book, and he was happy to do so.
In conversation with Audun Vinger
"Lars Elling has written a warm and fascinating book about the downfall of the musician Stian Carstensen - and the subsequent resurrection", wrote Audun Vinger in his review of the book in Dagens Næringsliv.
Together with partner Filip Roshauw i recently awarded Jazznytt and the newsletter Now It's The Time they have also given Elling and Carstensen a few meters of text in an insightful interview.
The first meeting
The chapter below depicts the first meeting between Lars Elling and Stian Carstensen in 2011, with Arne Nordheim present. In one place, Carstensen is referred to as "an incoming best friend".
This chapter sets a fine tone for the conversation the two will have at Privat Bar during the Kongsberg Jazz Festival on festival Friday 5 July, with the aforementioned Vinger as the interviewer.
Buy a ticket for Lars Elling and Stian Carstensen's conversation with Audun Vinger here.
Stian Carstensen also performs with his Horta project together with Elias Akselsen and Ola Kvernberg in Kongsberg Church on Thursday 4 July.
Buy a ticket for the Horta concert in Kongsberg Church here.
Read TASTE FROM THE BOOK:
Lars Elling: At the gate of the forest of silence
Wannabe,
Hang around,
Prospect,
Member.
These are the four stages on the road to full membership in a motorcycle club, as it has been explained to me. Not unlike my way into music. The problem is that I have stopped somewhere in between hung around og prospect. From there to member required qualities one must be born with. Abilities that must be confirmed in the genetics and then trimmed in several ten-thousand-hour intervals, the lifetime I have spent on the painting. My membership fee is therefore unpaid. Although, it must then be allowed to dream? In late summer 2011, an opportunity arose that allowed me to challenge my shyness and inferiority in the club I so wanted to belong to. Could I, with piano accompaniment in hand, make a small vocal table program in Sinatra style, in connection with the end of the season at Gamle Ormelet? Ormelet is a gallery and concert venue that is a well-visited institution on Tjøme, whose archipelago lies within comfortable distance of Oslo, and therefore multiplies its population by ten during the summer months. This evening, for the same reason, the hall was alarmingly full. I had intended to introduce myself as a strolling casual crooner in a nice suit, but even before the first song's intro had finished playing, it felt as if my own tie was brutally strangling me and I couldn't make a sound. What little confidence I had saved up evaporated when I discovered that the high priest of non-figurative contemporary music, Arne Nordheim, was sitting in the front row. My knees clattered arrhythmically barely a meter from the composer's. In his face and posture he wore an expression of patient suffering which I thought had to do with me. My paper-dry upper lip was stuck to my front teeth and my tongue was stuck in my palate, and because I didn't dare to make eye contact with the audience, I fixed my gaze on the exit door. It was attractively branded escape route. Suddenly it was slammed against a wide wall, and in burst a banjo, an accordion, a guitar, two flutes and a bagpipe, all attached to a sweaty man in a bowler hat.
'Stian!', shouted the hostess Dorthe excitedly. 'You know Stian, don't you?'
Many did. But not me.
'Can't you sit in with these two, then?', she continued. 'They play songbook classics like you probably can.' The newcomer took off his jacket and bowler and strapped himself into the instrument. He unhooked a leather strap and the pod's cooling fins opened in a deep breath.
'What song are you playing, then?'
'Nancy with the laughing face', said pianist Eilif Moe. 'C#.'
'I've never heard that one', said Stian Carstensen nonchalantly and played a C#. 'Like that? We'll figure it out.'
Eilif and I had practiced a lot and knew the song well. The accordion fit in responsively at the back of the measure, where it is easiest for the musician to guess where the melody is going. It sounded promising. Maybe it wasn't so scary to have a new man put in after all?
But when we got to the B part, the stab, which breaks the song, we were lost. The piano tried with insistent theatrical soufflé: D#, Abm, Abma7!?
But the accordion had left the room. It was as if it had been looking forward to being disconnected, as if someone had stepped from an open window and now it saw its cut to run away, into freedom, into the summer evening. I put my hands in my pockets, nodded my head jazzily and pretended that this had been part of the plan, troll in a box for a while, before the adults take control again. Useless. The accordion was a child traveling alone, completely in his own world. He who sat and pressed and pulled it, sat with closed eyes and somehow had nothing to say, just followed the associations that fell out of the instrument, commented on them, quoted them, passed them on in a whisper of familiar and unfamiliar themes . Rhythmic stumbling blocks were strewn everywhere. Around and above them, bits of melody ran, like wild puppies between our ankles.
The hall smiled. Arne Nordheim smiled. Eilif stared at the keys as if he had never seen them before.
I felt lonely and superfluous where I stood. One who, by opening his mouth, could destroy everything.
The man with the accordion downshifted, a vacuum was created in the bellows and all the notes that had been out in the air were sucked in again. He made eye contact with me and held it as the notes inside the accordion fell back into a recognizable sequence. And then this: a little melodic reminder of where we were before the improvisations took over, ending with a seventh chord, just long enough for me to fill my lungs for the third verse of this ballad songwriter Jimmy van Heusen managed to imagine Sinatra had written to the superstar's daughter.
When the evening was over, it had only just begun. The audience disappeared, Nordheim too, but Stian remained and it was like meeting a boy of the same age on the first day of the holiday. Scrape on the knee, watchful eye over the bicycle handlebars. Friend or foe? But isn't that the Tottenham kit he's wearing, and when he spits in the dirt and asks what your name is, doesn't it then become clear that he's at the same stage of teething as you?
Is it simply an impending best friend you have ahead of you on the road?
People went and we stayed, dark blue night to pale morning, and all the time we chatted and sang. No matter what we talked about, there was a song that said it better, and all the words and notes in the world lived inside this guy with the incredible instrument, they could only be shaken out.
What a happiness it is to be able to speak with the voice of the brain, at the speed of thought, without facilitating, without having to translate into the recipient's language.
Our free-willed neurons whizzed like blood-trimmed cabriolets along the wide autobahns of the nerves, free speed limit, goof ball allowed! Nothing was embarrassing. Hearing the sound of one's own voice can make the hardiest blush. Most people who know a few chords on the piano do not hesitate to play them if the piano is there, but when asked to sing the melody that goes with it, they fall silent. The singing voice is associated with risk, with reward or shame, as if a lot is at stake, and you risk losing your honor if you sing sourly. But it is not dangerous. Everyone can. To some extent, at least. Just tighten and loosen the vocal cords to the best of your ability, blow air through them, while telling a story, and out comes a song. Dogs do not distinguish between good or bad smells, they sort by relevance: is this one interesting smell? Such a dog was my new friend. It wasn't about perfection, it was about storytelling. I came up with an old Boy Scout song we used to end our childhood meetings with. Stian identified the melody as diatonic Gregorian and set out to orchestrate it for three voices.
So I sat there and peered in wonder into this strange head, into a new and alien universe, which nevertheless felt strangely familiar: In my childhood Donaldblades there was often a middle page with tasks, a kind of miniature IQ test for the young readers. It could be an obstacle course between Uncle Skrue and his lucky ring that had to be forced, or a woodpecker code that had to be broken. The tasks were all annoying, but the ones I disliked aller mostly they were where you had to draw a line between the numbers 1 and 149 and thus eventually discover a dragon or perhaps Great Wolf and the pigs. The numbers were placed so close together that one had to be extremely careful to avoid revealing the finished picture in advance. In protest against being a hand puppet without self-will, a draftsman with a held pen, I used to draw the line completely independent of the chronology of the numbers. Maybe it could be a bear or a bicycle instead? My parents looked at me with growing concern and interpreted this not as anarchist practice, but as an indicator of a lack of intellectual baggage. I could count, right?
At Ormelet with Stian, I experienced the musical equivalent of my own brain's disobedience:
He was deep into Beethoven and then suddenly, via a mysterious association, he fell into the bird dance, which via an abrupt syncopation became Take on me. And it was experienced as completely rigorous and logical. Not surprising at all. I heard, through all the baroque whimsy, that melodies and riffs are a kind of historical and cultural commons. Something everyone has access to.
It was daylight outside. People started coming to work. They shook the summer rain out of their hair and spoke softly together in sleepy voices. We had skimmed the sheets and were still awake. We warmed up the night's food for breakfast, drank two beers, and elegantly preempted our lumbermen.
And that's how I was going to try to remember Stian. As he was that August night at Tjøme. Completely accessible, easy-going, self-confident and invulnerable, bursting with life and curious about everything. It was going to be vital to hold on to this image, not forget who he really is, but try to project it up who he became, just a few years later.
The extract is published with the author's approval. It is taken from At the gate to the forest of silence - A tale of friendship, art and the disobedient brain by Lars Elling (Publisher October, 2024).
