STARFIRE SURPRISES FANS AND THE BAND
Jaga Jazzist from Norway to play Sled Island
Experimental. Electro. Dance. Psych. Ambient. World. And of course jazz.
At one time, in various degrees and combinations Norwegian veterans Jaga Jazzist have found themselves described as such.
And from album to album over the course of their 20-plus-year career, sometimes even from track to track, minute to minute, they’ve been all of those things.
But the truth of Jaga Jazzist, the vision and the sound lies somewhere in between. By design.
“That’s always been an important thing with this band is to try to make music that journalists or the audience have a hard time categorizing,” says songwriter, multi-instrumentalist and bandleader Lars Horntveth, who formed the group in Oslo with his brother Martin back in ’94.
“That’s the main reason to still have this band, I think, to have that approach where you at least try to do something that you haven’t heard before. We want to make music that surprises ourselves, basically, and the audience.”
They’ve done that yet again with their recent mind-bender Starfire, which they’ll bring to town for a Sled Island show this Saturday night ( before, it should be noted, heading to Saskatoon, Ottawa and Montreal to take part in those city’s jazz festivals.)
It’s an astoundingly immersive and, not surprisingly, eclectic five-song, 50-minute listen, recalling everyone from Daft Punk and the Chemical Brothers to Herbie Hancock, Stewart Copeland and Tangerine Dream.
It is, as Horntveth says, very much a studio album, one that was pieced together in the Jazzist’s home recording studio, with the songwriter bringing in the compositions and the rest of the eight-piece — including other Horntveth brother Line — lending their respective parts.
This time out, though, those compositions had to come a little farther than previous ones.
As the artist says, it was common practise for him to head to the States prior to working on an album, because he found it helpful “being out of my usual element.”
“It’s great to be in another place and be away from everything,” he says.
Previously that saw him going to New York for three or four months to clear his head. Starfire, however, had him relocating to Los Angeles, which would become integral in the sonics that make up the band’s sixth studio album — but not for the sun, sand, silicone, etc. that are the usual reasons.
“I’m not sure how direct the influence of being in Los Angeles was — that’s very hard to say for me,” he says.
“But one thing that is kind of important is before I moved there I didn’t have a license … It’s the worst place in the world not to have a car.”
So Horntveth returned home, took his test, got his licence, and went back to L.A. where, well, he drove. And listened to house music. And drove. And kept listening. To one or two albums over and over and over again.
“I wouldn’t say I’m studying it but I just want to get everything out of that album,” he says, noting two in particular were works by Jon Hopkins and Todd Terje.
“So that was, maybe the inspiration for this album, to listen to some house music and try to make something similar, but that was more about the build-up in the song, basically.”
And there is a lot of build-up in the instrumentals, the 12-anda-half-minute Oban a bubbling symphony that sweeps panoramically around the ears, with a tweak or two of familiarity tugging the brain back into the deep, cool aural pool. Again, that’s by design according to Horntveth.
“There are a lot of references to music that we’re inspired by,” he says, “and for me it’s super obvious, but that’s an important part of the production is to disguise those references as good as we can.”
Be they house references, jazz references, world references, pop references, experimental references — it doesn’t really matter to Jaga Jazzist, as long as you’re willing to fully buy into wherever it is they want to take you, however far out they want to go.
“It’s supposed to be a trip,” Horntveth says and laughs.
Jaga Jazzist perform Saturday at the Republik as part of Sled Island.