1Six strings, new tones
Anyone with an Instagram profile and even the slightest interest in the jazz world has probably come across Casper Hejlesen.
»You are otherworldly«, one comment says under a video of free, atonal improvisation the young guitarist has posted there. I largely agree. With only a few records under his belt (put on last year’s ’Langmod’!), Hejlesen has emerged as a boundary-pushing, fearless improviser, and his understated, inquisitive music has caused a stir far beyond Denmark. Entirely deserved.
During the festival, Hejlesen returns ’home’ with a concert at Brønshøj’s new cultural center, Brøk. With new music in the borderlands between free jazz and contemporary composed music – and in a new quartet format with London cellist Benedicte Adrian, Gustav Broman on bass, and the ever-present Cornelia Nilsson on drums.
Casper Hejlesen Quartet. Brønshøj Sommer Jazz, July 4
2Musvit in the Meatpacking District
I’ve previously written in these pages about the young musicians in the Danish-Swedish group Musvit (great titmouse), but there’s reason to single them out again. In a couple of weeks, the band’s debut album will be released, and during the festival they’ll play the new material at H15 in the Meatpacking District.
I’ve had a sneak listen, and there’s plenty to look forward to. The band and lead singer Ronja Rose Andersson tumble between diary-like dispatches from life in your 20s, moss-green Scandinavian forest jazz, half-heavy hip-hop, and tributes to both Miles Davis and Lee Konitz.
My expectations are high for Musvit, who have gotten off to such a beautiful start and only seem to grow more and more interesting as time goes on.
Musvit. H15, July 9
3Diamond rhythms
Drummer and singer Anja Jacobsen, from the noise-metal death-jazz band Selvhenter and Valby Vokalgruppe, has borrowed Alice in Nørrebro for what sounds like a properly spacey evening.
Jacobsen is planning a site-specific performance for percussion, voice, and guitar, and the venue describes it like this:
She has »developed her own compositional method ... the so-called ’diamond rhythms’ are visual, intuitive structures of colored dots arranged in patterns that can be interpreted from multiple directions. The result is music in constant motion, where repetitions shift, break apart, and reemerge«, and that certainly sounds like something that could branch out and dart off in any number of directions. How wonderful.
Anja Jacobsen: Variations – with Lars Bech Pilgaard (guitar) and Anders Bach (percussion). Alice CPH, July 5
4Oslo t/r
Some of the wildest records being released these days are coming from Norway’s Sonic Transmission Records – a label with plenty of room for transgressive, searching, nerve-rattling music.
Very soon we’ll be able to tune in to the new album from Aarhus-based Caktus, whose musicians have teamed up with the Oslo big band Ojkos in a kind of cross-Scandinavian collaboration.
The result is a deeply sensual record, where Danish composer Maria Dybbroe’s chamber-music-like pieces are given new life and heft by the sound of 15 – rather than the usual 5 – musicians. Big-band music for our moment. Several tracks from the album will be performed in Christianshavn during the festival, though this time without a full big band behind them.
Caktus. Christianshavns Beboerhus, July 4
5Taking back power
Saxophonist Maria Faust grew up in 1980s Estonia and, from early childhood, had the Soviet regime’s musical propaganda pumped straight into her ears. In other words: You were supposed to march in time. Time, time. Chop, chop, chop.
That, of course, invites a reckoning, and last year Faust took back the march music, broke it apart, and reassembled it – when it didn’t simply dissolve altogether – on the fairly wild and also quite thought-provoking album ’Marches Rewound & Rewritten’.
At Brorson Church, the album will be performed again by Faust herself and a larger horn ensemble in various configurations – along with, of course, the snare drum, the march’s driving signature.
Maria Faust: Sacrum Facere ‘Marches Rewound and Rewritten’. Brorsons Kirke, July 7
