Vossa Jazz Festival at 52, with New Blood

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Each year around Easter, the lovely and smallish lakeside city of Voss, Norway springs to musical life for a weekend. Voss is a go-to destination for skiers flocking to the snowy slopes high above the town, and host to an extreme sports festival come summer. But the legendary Vossa Jazz festival, which staged an especially luminous 52nd anniversary edition in April, is a well-known cultural treasure—especially as a showcase for Norwegian jazz and jazz-adjacent artists.

Vossa Jazz also earns specialty points as the kickoff event in Norway's formidable jazz festival season, highlighted by newly commissioned works, a dense schedule and a ceremonial sheepshead dinner in the margins (more on that later). The 2025 edition also earns distinction as the maiden voyage for a new director, Roger Urhaug, who achieved a measure of triumph on the job, in the wake of the long fruitful tenure of Trude Storheim (2008-2023) and a transition year directed by Leila Melkevoll, which also lived up to the festival's considerable legacy.

As a testament to adapting to unexpected pressure in the festival machinery, one of this year's highlights arrived early, and in the form of a late-breaking surprise. The grand opening concert was originally slated as a showcase for veteran Danish-born, Norwegian-based pianist Nils Petter Molvaer to team up with the band Inazuma—consisting of the Kannegaard trio's drummer Thomas Strønen and bassist Ole Morten Vågan, multi-brained and nimble-fingered keyboardist Ståle Storløkken and ever-tasteful pianist Anja Lauvdal (from the trio Moskus and beyond).

The resulting almost-brand-new hybrid band proved something unique, worthy of further exploration. Molvaer, it should be noted, presented his landmark work Khmer as the commissioned work of a Vossa Jazz festival—recorded for an ECM album which helped launch his international profile—and reprised the piece for Vossa Jazz' 50th anniversary two years ago. Here, he relied less on electronic effects than usual and wove beautifully into the ensemble fabric taking off on material by members and also Kannegaard. The performance proved a felicitous mix of moods, of freedom abutting and wrapping around structures, and a general quality of collective energy wave-riding. More, please.

Speaking of ECM connections, this is a festival whose artists have often been featured on the ECM roster, a tendency well-tended in this edition. On the Friday program alone, we heard the melodic, lyrical and spidery charms of guitarist Jacob Young's trio (with bassist Mats Eilertsen and young woman drummer Veslemey Narvesen) in the new venue of the downtown Sparebank), as heard on 2023's ECM album Eventually.

That night, across the street in the 13th century church, the Vangskyrke, the sound of the refined new duet ECM album Our Time, by saxophonist Trygve Seim and accordionist Frode Haltli, a clear high point of the weekend. In this sacred ancient space, the lived-in musical linkage of Seim and Haltli (who played in Seim's great "Sangam" project among other settings) was graced by a particular depth, dialoguing ease and ambient glow. In a seamless hour-long statement, the pair traversed improvisational routes around simple, affecting themes, as on the album, with sweet and melancholic eloquence. They get along famously, and graciously.

(On a personal note, the one downside of basking in the Seim/Haltli set was missing the concurrent show by Eirik Hegdal Elektisk Samband: I'm an avowed Hegdal fan, especially since hearing his powerful and witty commissioned work "Musical Balloon" at Vossa Jazz in 2018).

Haltli made a quick change and crossed another Voss street to join in a very different ensemble, in scale and focus, as part of the 11-piece Erlend Apneseth Ensemble at the Gamlekinoen theater venue. Apseneth is an adaptable master of the indigenous Norwegian hardingfele (Hardanger fiddle), and he was one of four such Nordic fiddlers in the fluid mix of themes and structural hang zones in the hypnotic set.

Hardingfele and ECM-ishness returned in full force early on Saturday afternoon in the intimate Osasalen performance space of the Ole Bull Academy (specializing in Norwegian folk music), with highly respected fiddler Nils Okland in band mode. In a set moving fluidly through extended improv passages and centering riffs/melodies rooted in Norwegian folk aesthetics, Okland was the benevolent guiding force for a band including his long-time partner Sigbjorn Apeland on harmonium, Eilertson on bass (one of a few appearances around the festival), coloristic drummer-percussionist Håkon March Stene and sometimes livewire saxophonist Rolf-Erik Nystrom, briefly dipping into the double-horn effect of Rahsaan Roland Kirk. An encore with a reflective melody over a soft murmuring vibraphone bed felt reminiscent of Bill Evans' "Peace Piece."

A double-header highlight on Saturday was the two-pronged focus on the important and restlessly creative British pianist Kit Downes, shining in very different settings. Saturday afternoon at the Osasalen, Downes demonstrated his rich and exhilarating gift in free improv mode—on the keyboard and inside the piano—in a fruitful duet with the potent saxophonist Camila Nebbia, the Argentinian-in-Berlin deserving wider recognition for her ferocity and dynamic sensitivity in uncharted territory. Their set closed gracefully with the cameo-ing arrival of Oslo-based vocalist Loe Bjørnstad, issuing subtle vocalizations in her customized dialect mode.

Late on Saturday night, Downes returned in the decidedly more formal and controlled format of accompanist/partner with inspired British veteran vocalist Norma Winstone, calling on material from their recent ECM album, Outpost of Dreams. Though representing different generations and different idiomatic byways of jazz, proper, the two felt remarkably in synch and in poetic accord, on a supple but never sentimental set of songs, capped off by a radiant take on Jimmy Rowles' "The Peacocks/A Timeless Place," a Winstone specialty.

There were plenty of other treats in the festival line-up, in a dense schedule making us long for the ability to be in two (or three) places at once. Young pianist Sondre Moshagen, with his empathic Lightning Trio, impressed with his technical and conceptual strengths. He's a new Norwegian piano voice worth keeping tabs on. The young but popular Kjetil Mulelide's Agoja band, late on Saturday night, accentuated the leader's melodic designs and flavors, in an all-star band featuring such well-known and loved Norwegian players as lyrical trumpeter Mathias Eick, Seim and the pedal steel vibe-supplier Lars Horntveth. Among the impressions offered up were shades of an instrumental twist on Bruce Hornsby's sound.

One of the surprise treats of the festival arrived on Sunday at noon in the lobby of the Gamlekinoen with the young trio called Himmelfarten—sans p.a. and with the audience in the round, encircling Vemund Styve on harmonium (this was a festival which thankfully mostly avoided digital keyboards), guitarist Trygve Tronstad and Martin Borge on tenor guitar and banjo. All sing at times, together and in wandering mode. Their music defies easy description, a blend of ambient qualities, fake folk, gentle absurdism, vague echoes of Pentangle and that British folk scene, and an all-around hypnotic collective sound on tap.

Adjustments is the name of a powerful and unpretentious mainstream piano trio based in Trondheim, a snugly integrated threesome of bassist Svein Folkvord, nimble drummer Håkon Mjåset Johansen and the dazzling pianist Vigleik Storaas, who trafficked in freshly-cooked ideas and mutating rhythmic notions. Their Sunday afternoon set closed with on a benedictory note with Bill Evan's meltingly beautiful "Turn out the Stars."

In larger ensemble news, the literal first concert featured Room Service, a tentet of gifted young musicians, in shifting genre modes and sometimes with an artful spin reminiscent of Annette Peacock, on vocal spotlight moments featuring Alma Wikstrom. Sunday afternoon brought along the fiery fine Bergen Big Band—a tradition at the festival—this year giving tight, resonant form to the diverse charts of boldly talented Australian big band composer-bandleader Vanessa Perica.

Each year in Voss, all eyes, ears and hopes are on the unknown commodity known as the Tingingsverk, a large commissioned work by a carefully-selected artist capable of rising to the task. Each piece is unveiled in the prime time Saturday night slot of the festival program. This year's model, saxophonist and eclectic project-maker Kjetil Møster's bedazzling, visceral and complex Sense, Organ, Motion, bears a title which somehow conveyed the over-arching spirit and changing modalities of the score.

For his 75-minute magnum opus, Møster swerves through elements of hard bop, free jazz, rock-infused energy blasts and lyrical eddies, with touches of Norwegian folk in the mix, courtesy of another hardingfele sighting, courtesy of the fine and flexible player Benedicte Maurseth. Also in the diverse ten-piece ensemble was the always impressive trumpeter Eivind Lønning—handily blending jazz colors with new music ideas—experimental vocalist Sofia Jernberg and foundation-keeping and mutating master drummer Gard Nilssen. The sum effect made for one of this listener's favorite commissioned works, of the 16 I've heard so far.

And then it was time for sheep's head. As is the festival tradition, a select group of VIPs, local dignitaries and press stragglers (ahem) join in paying tribute to the Tingingsverk musicians in the ceremonial banquet known as "Smalahove." This Hardanger region and generally Norwegian feast involves the serving of a half sheep's head on a plate, with potatoes, mashed rutabaga, beer and the indigenous caraway-spiced liqueur Aquavit.

Some are squeamish at the prospect of dining on the cheeks, eyeballs and other head-related parts. I always say "bring it on," citing the moral imperative of respecting the killed animal by not letting it go to waste. Deeper down, though, I just enjoy the savory and ceremonial experience. It's part of the ample deposits of in-house Vossa Jazz charm. Said charm, and cultural worth, is fully intact at 52.

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