Today, nu-jazz is perhaps a term that jazz fans and even the godfather of the genre Bugge Wesseltoft might well wince at. Yet a decade ago it burst out of the Oslo jazz underground and took Europe by storm, spearheaded by Wesseltoft’s New Conception of Jazz. A catalyst for change on the Oslo scene as a player and label boss, the influential pianist and keys player is still a force to be reckoned with, as a new boxed set and a brand new solo album reminds us. And he reveals how he is now turning to still further challenges thrown up by the dizzying advances of the digital age. Interview: Stuart Nicholson.

 In the late-1990s and early third millennium years, Bugge Wesseltoft’s New Conception of Jazz had crowds queuing around two and three blocks to see them. While it’s fair to say they never made quite the same impact in the UK, at clubs like the Blå in Oslo, the New Morning in Paris, the Fabrik in Hamburg, the Fasching in Stockholm, the Kaufleuten in Zurich or the Jazzhouse in Copenhagen, you had to be there at least an hour before doors to be sure to get in.

These were heady times. A new order of jazz sounds was emerging from Oslo’s jazz underground, spread initially by word of mouth, as Wesseltoft’s New Conception of Jazz and Sharing and Nils Petter Molvaer’s Khmer raced to six figure album sales. Out of sight and out of mind of mainstream jazz culture, Norway had thrown a curve ball that had caught everyone by surprise.

Wesseltoft and Molvaer went on the road, taking their music out of Scandinavia and into Germany and France, “a new cutting edge,” said the French newspaper Libèration. Their remarkable success spread around Europe like wildfire and perhaps more than an earlier generation of Norwegian musicians, such as Jan Garbarek, Jon Christensen and Arild Andersen, they were responsible for putting Norway well and truly on the jazz map of the world. They even caused reverberations in the home of jazz itself, “Europeans Cut In With A New Sound and Beat,” said a major feature in The New York Times in 2001.
 
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