Andreas Wildhagen’s Spiralis
Beauty No Beauty
NORWAY NAKAMA RECORDS NKM026 CD (2024)
Norwegian jazz from this talented quartet of players led by the drummer Andreas Wildhagen.
As a group they’re quite new, but for his dream-team Andreas picked some old friends and partners to play in this combination, including the sax player Kasper Værnes with whom he’s been making music since 2008. We heard them on the Troposgrafien record in 2018. There’s also Adrian Fiskum Myhr on double bass (sometime member of Oker) and Anja Pauvdal on piano and synths (she made a fine droney tuba-and-synth duo as one half of Skrap).
Andreas Wildhagen’s Spiralis have at least two ambitions – (A) to improve the forms of improvised music and free jazz, and (B) to change the world. For the former, they’re trying to make a move back to using static motifs and repeated themes, which on their part is a conscious rejection of the “anything-goes” school of free improv, where the principal guiding light is constant change. I suppose these Norwegians figured if they alighted on a nifty sequence through their playing, why not replay and recycle it? At the same time, they don’t follow the path of any given post-bop small group in Afro-American jazz, i.e. play the “head” and then circle back to it after a few minutes of instrumental inventions. These strategies (and others) have led to a certain amount of satisfaction and fulfilment for the players in Andreas Wildhagen’s Spiralis, who enjoyed the pleasant surprises as they rehearsed – after which they were led into the recording studio, while the ideas were still fresh. As to changing the world, you can read on the Bandcamp page an impassioned statement about the political and geographic state of the world today, quite possibly reflecting the radical views of Wildhagen himself, where he’s equally inflamed about the global rise of capitalism and fascism, and the remorseless destruction of our natural habitat. It’s a pessimistic take no doubt, but music can help: “Music can be an instrument for changing thought patterns and revitalizing society, and coming back to a natural respect for life.”
While supporting all of these laudable aims, and taking heart in this collective belief in the power of art, I still find myself underwhelmed by the actual music on Beauty No Beauty. It’s ably performed by talented people, yet it feels tentative and meandering, in places like a schematic recasting of elements absorbed from John Coltrane records. The ambitions are strong, but the music is merely pleasant and lacks real force. (01/11/2024)