Maker of moods obeys the melody

When Tord Gustavsen's trio made its debut for the great German ECM label more than two years ago with Changing Places, he said something which, obvious though it may be, is striking in an era obsessed with change - that it wasn't necessary to invent a new language to say something new, writes Ray Comiskey

It's a philosophy he has followed rigorously since, underlined by an exquisitely beautiful concert in Dublin soon after, and by the group's second ECM CD, The Ground, released last year.

For him and the trio, completed by bassist Harald Johnsen and drummer Jarle Vespestad, it has paid off both artistically and in steadily rising international appeal. Deeply serious - his PhD thesis at the University of Oslo has the forbidding title "The Dialectical Erotism of Improvisation" - he nevertheless sets great store by things of the emotions and spirit. It's no surprise, then, to find that in person he's warm and patently sincere; the kind of man you'd be happy to call a friend.

The French poet, Rimbaud, once said that the door closes on a writer at 20. There's a hard core of truth in it, even for a jazz musician such as Gustavsen, who shows no sign of letting any doors shut. So what were his formative influences?

"Well," he answers carefully, "this is a very fundamental issue that we've been, both consciously and unconsciously, working with, especially with the latest trio album, I think, because my formative influences were especially grounded in church music, both in Lutheran hymns and gospel music that we heard around the house and in our church, and also in the lullabies of the Norwegian tradition."

There was something else that was to prove significant. "I started out improvising, because my father played the piano when I was little and I sat on his knee and we played around with music together. It was based on, of course, all the impulses that were there for him and the music he knew. We came up with children's songs and we made small operas, you know, making up stories with music in them."

In classical music there were the usual suspects; Mozart, Bach ("some of the more simple pieces, although Bach is never simple to play well"). But, as his teens approached, there were other, more surprising, mixtures.

"I started being introduced to things like Shostakovitch, Ravel, Debussy, also Schoenberg and Norwegian 12-tone composers like Valen. He's an incredibly interesting composer, doing totally contrapuntal music, where you have the lines going in different voices, also in piano solo music, completely atonal."

The urge to improvise remained, fostered by, of all things, the New Orleans jazz records his father had at home. "But we really didn't have that many records and it wasn't until my mid-teens that I heard more standard jazz-rock-fusion type of music. And then from there it is very natural to dig deeper, to go back in history to the sources of that music. And that's when I started discovering jazz standards and listening to older jazz."

More specifically, he says, this was the jazz of the 1950s and 1960s, at first, from bebop onwards. "What has been happening lately," he explains, "is a fusion of a contemporary mind, so to speak, with the immense powers of the spirituals and the early blues and the gospel music. I think this going back to these fields of artistic source has been especially important to me because I grew up with hymns and spirituals. So going to these parts of the history of music is not only an abstract way of researching the roots of jazz, it's also for me a way of conversing with my own musical core and getting in touch with what comes as natural as speaking to me."

In other words, there's an emotional connection as well? "Yes, and I think we were on that track from the beginning with the trio. But the composing and making of the second album, and the playing during that process and later on, has brought about that really intense dialogue between the urge for freedom and making the music fresh every day, and the urge for playing music on a strong sensual and emotionally attaching ground. "And then we try to make music as honest and contemporary as we can - contemporary in a very general sense of the word - on that ground. And to me that's really the only way of improvising music that feels meaningful right now."

Even the most cursory listen to the trio's second CD reveals that it is drenched in deeply felt emotion. Had he been through some profound personal experience, or should one ask? "Oh, well," he says, hesitantly, "sadly, that's the case - and The Ground is not, first and foremost, about me using music as a way of getting through grief. But, still, those tunes were composed around the time of a very tragic incident in my family, and we had to deal with the fact that we lost three generations in a car crash. It's not something that I mention in any kind of interview, but since you clearly picked up on it from the music, it's illuminating, I guess."

This is borne out by the fact that there's no sense of catharsis in the music. The complex emotions that lie behind it are simply a part of it. And, also, his is not the only voice determining the emotional climate of the trio's music; there are also those of Johnsen and Vespestad.

In the past, he has mentioned two other jazz influences on his music; the Scandinavian pianist/composers Jan Johansson and Jon Balke. Johansson was noted for his interest in Swedish folk music, epitomised by his most famous album, Jazz På Svenska. Was this aspect of Johansson's work an influence on him, or was it his work generally?

"Both," he answers. "The record you mention is the one of him that I was first exposed to, so it was definitely one of several important influences. He worked a lot in films, actually, and also wrote beautiful music for children's films. And he worked a lot with Swedish jazz, and with Stan Getz, among others. So the scope of his work is amazing for such a short life span. Also, the way he is funky and the way he incorporates a blues kind of stream into everything he does is also an influence."

In the past few years Gustavsen has become more interested in some of the more esoteric Norwegian folk traditions, even playing for a short while in a quartet which played some traditional dance forms. It leaves a mark in some way, although this isn't obvious.

"Among other things," he explains, "you work with rhythms that are really different and complex in a way that standard jazz rhythms are not at all. Working with things like that does transform you and increase rhythmic flexibility. But I still don't think there are very many direct links between traditional Norwegian music and what we play in the trio."

And Balke? "He was among the first really profound contemporary jazz encounters that I had in the very early 1990s, and I still like his work a lot, both as a pianist and as an ensemble leader and the way he writes for larger ensembles. His work is not as intensely occupying my mind now as it was, but still he's definitely a major influence."

Essentially, their musical concerns as composers and performers are quite different. "He has a stronger urge to compose contemporary music, so to speak, and to be a musical thinker that takes things into larger formats that work with other parameters than I have found meaningful."

Gustavsen has also worked a lot with singers in the past, most notably Silje Nergaard. What impact has that had on his playing? "I think it's been very important for my melodic approach to music. I always played with singers, and with church choirs before that, and my way of approaching music is shaped by the fact that melodies and lyricism are at the core of both. The interplay I got with singers of different kinds through the years has shaped my melodic ear and helped develop a taste for minimalism and the powers of interpreting a melody.

"For me, playing a melody is a very important thing. I really emphasise the nuances and the creative possibilities of shaping a melody according to your emotions. And that is definitely linked to my playing with singers."

Is a melody a very effective way to establish a mood for the subsequent improvisations?

"It is," he replies, "and in the trio we're very much concerned about taking moods seriously and staying there. When a good mood comes along, it's important to take it seriously and to really evolve it and obey the mood created; to let the music evolve organically and let the rhythmic doublings and harmonic extensions, and all these things that we do as jazz musicians, come from obeying the basic mood and the melody."

There is not implied criticism of other approaches in this, he stresses. It's just a crucial part of the way the trio works. And, with the uncertainty inherent in improvisation, to maintain a sense of unity and wholeness in performance is easier said than done.

"For us," he says, "the building of musical wholes with composition and improvisation has evolved along this basic approach of obeying melody. I find, these days and also on the second album, there is a lot more quoting of the composed material inside the improvisations. So, in a way, improvisation gets to be a meditation on the melodic kernels or the basic composition; the musical whole is much more a meditation on the source lying in the composition."

Reports of performances from their tours this year suggest that the trio has hit a collective groove which, at the moment, shows every sign of developing further along the lines he mentions, including Caribbean rhythms, blues, gospel and hymns.

"One of the most fulfilling things about working with the trio has been that, in many respects, we've found different approaches than the usual ways of thinking that contrasts are always necessary; that you need to find something else, or it gets boring, and you need to introduce an uptempo tune before people get a ballad, or you need to have a guest saxophone player because you cannot go back to the same place with the trio.

"And, you know, fruitful as contrasts may be, I think many people are too obsessed with them and afraid of staying with what feels good. And one of the most rewarding things with the trio has been that we have dared to stay in landscapes that have a feeling important to us. It's about freshness, not necessarily change." Which is where we came in.

The Tord Gustavsen Trio plays at Vicar Street on Sat, Oct 1

Born: Oslo, October 5th, 1970 Education: Degree in Humanist and Social Studies; PhD at University of Oslo; three years' jazz training at Conservatory of Music, Trondheim. Guest teacher, jazz piano and theory, University of Oslo 1998-2002.

Recordings: Three with Silje Nergaard, two with a duo, aire & angels, two with Nymark Collective (New Orleans and Caribbean grooves), two with SKRUK (Choir and guest singers) and, with ECM, Changing Places (2003) and The Ground (2005)