Alex Ventling's Wavemakers at Becco in Oslo

Alex Ventling's Wavemakers
Becco
Oslo
September 3, 2026

In Oslo's Tullinkvartalet district, the pulsing of the Delta Light Installation leads to the courtyard of Becco, a wine bar and hotspot of the city's music scene, where on the second floor one finds a concert venue. On this night, light converged with the music of the Wavemakers, a Nordic chamber jazz quartet.

Alex Ventling, the New Zealand-born pianist and composer with Swiss roots now based in Trondheim, brought the Wavemakers south for the 25th concert in their four-year history. The quartet is unconventional: drums and light percussion (August Glännestrand), with no bass, but Tuva Halse's violin, vibraphone (Amund Stenøien), and Ventling 's piano, and small electronics tucked into the interstices.

After the release of Wavemakers (Particular Recordings Collective, 2025), a tour of Japan in winter 2026 allowed the group to test new repertoire, which they recorded that spring. With a second album scheduled for release in spring 2027, the Becco concert was a timely moment to take stock.

Ventling's compositions develop from melodic ideas from which repetitive motifs are born, transforming and answering one another, punctuated by definitive chords. Presenting a blank page for the improviser, the compositions were rich with the promise of improvisatory freedom, where accompaniment was transmuted into counterpoint.

The pulsations of the Delta installation were evoked in "Fish Scale," a serene variation on the Aeolian mode whose waves spread further and further out while echoes of the Lydian mode, darker or brighter, crossed the wave at varying speeds. Could the fish that the music called to mind belong to the species Russellia lydiana? Another cousin could well be Philipglassichthys repetitivus, so closely do these variations echo some episodes from the American minimalist composer's opera/ballet "Les Enfants Terribles," especially "The Somnambulist."

"Propelling," a seriously rhythmic, straight-time piece, allowed Stenøien to remind us what a great melodist he is, as was apparent on his quartet's Coming To Pass (Sonic Transmissions Records, 2023). Following his solo, Glännestrand shifted into African pulse mode behind a hallucinatory solo by Halse, guided by a few discreet washes from Ventling.

Glännestrand is an astonishing drummer who adapts his style according to his friends, and he has many. As a wavemaker, he builds open spaces which the other musicians enter to take their place. There they find dry wood, crystal, bronze and skins; the dense and the light, the shiny and the matte, the smooth and the rough, the struck and the brushed, the straight and the oblique. All the space is occupied, and everything is in its place. The magic happens. Glännestrand is both a watchmaker, assembling both precision watches and monumental clocks, and a master goldsmith.

The concert picked up speed with the performances of two pieces Wavemakers initial release: "Trondheim I" and "Omaha," the latter named for a New Zealand beach community near Auckland. The structural constraints of the compositions, though still just as precise, loosened, and the material softened. The improvisations returned to the wild, and the harmonies were pushed to their limits.

The brightness of these compositions gave way to the more somber tone of "Meandering," a dreamlike interlude, where Halse showed how her violin sound, far removed from classical sounds, is also different from the jazz violin sound we are used to hearing. The bow brushed the strings in a breath with great precision, sculpting the air with virtuosity. Reconnection (Jazzland Recordings, 2026), recorded two years earlier, had established her place in Nordic jazz violin. Since then, multiplying her musical experiences within and beyond jazz, Halse's playing has gained further depth and complexity. More than once, audiences have watched solos emerge with increasingly bold phrases and wondered how Halse would land back on her feet. But she knows where she is going.

Each piece seemed conceived not as a theme to be developed, but as a group space highlighting collective interplay and, within that framework, creating atmospheres suited to bringing each musician's playing to the fore in turn. In "Tree Dweller," a piece whose syncopated rhythm at times came close to samba (also a premiere), Stenøien wandered through the polyphony during a long, very melodic solo. In "Kaleidoscope," the last piece, again very syncopated, Ventling charged the atmosphere with baroque-flavored counterpoint before embarking on a furiously grooving excursion.

At this point, the question arose: What time is the second set? Alas, that will have to wait until spring. Until then, why not warm the ears with stuff by George Russell and Philip Glass?