Jazz Articles

Our daily articles are carefully curated by the All About Jazz staff. You can find more articles by searching our website, see what's trending on our popular articles page or read articles ahead of their published dates on our Coming Soon page. Read our daily album reviews.

Album Review

Jazz Out of Norway: 12th Set 2026

Read "12th Set 2026" reviewed by Daniel Mège

by Daniel Mège
September 28, 2026

Jazz Out Of Norway is a collection on Odin Records that compiles tracks drawn from some of the most emblematic albums released in Norway since 1989. The 12th Set is a valuable document that takes stock of the situation in 2026. This edition is remarkable for its musicality, its diversity of styles, but also for the sequencing of the 36 tracks (almost three hours), which highlights each one within the setting created by the tracks surrounding it. The ...

Album Review

Trondheim Jazz Orchestra & Espen Berg: Maetrix

by Chris May
August 17, 2024

Lana and Lilly Wachowski's The Matrix (1999)--an inspiration for Norwegian pianist and composer Espen Berg's Maetrix--divides opinion. The movie is regarded by some, including one assumes Berg, as a prescient masterpiece addressing the existential threat posed to humanity by digital technology. Others say it is pretentious twaddle. No worries. Discord is unlikely to greet Maetrix. Berg's gift for writing good tunes is front and center, the toplines and soloists riding rhythmic platforms which are borderline reminiscent of ...

Album Review

Flukten: Flukten

by Chris May
May 17, 2024

A supergroup of the best sort--based on talent rather than streaming numbers--Flukten consists of four musicians from some of the most creative bands in Norway, a stylistically varied crowd including Hanna Paulsberg Concept, Atomic, Espen Berg Trio Trio and Trondheim Jazz Orchestra. The group--tenor saxophonist Hanna Paulsberg, guitarist Marius Klovning, bassist Bárður Reinert Poulsen and drummer Hans Hulbækmo--debuted in 2021 with Velkommen Håp (Odin). The sound was, approximately, in the same bag as Britain's similarly constituted Partisans: jazz-rock played with ...

Album Review

Kjetil Mulelid: Agoja

by Chris May
April 11, 2024

Over the course of three albums with his trio between 2019 and 2022, and the exquisitely pretty solo set Piano (Rune Grammofon, 2021), keyboardist Kjetil Mulelid has emerged as a bright new star in Norwegian jazz. His playing is vivacious, his composing melodic and his overall sound consonant but full of unexpected twists and turns. Mulelid has been mentioned in the same breath as Bill Evans, Keith Jarrett and Brad Mehldau, and the comparisons, though excitable, have some merit.

Album Review

Espen Berg: Water Fabric

Read "Water Fabric" reviewed by Chris May

by Chris May
November 10, 2023

The Norwegian pianist and composer Espen Berg has already carved out a formidable reputation with his trio. Earlier in 2023 he began a parallel strand with The Trondheim Concert (NXN), the recording of a wholly in-the-moment improvised solo concert, in the Keith Jarrett tradition, which he gave in 2019. Berg has since released two more albums in the same vein: The Nidaros Concert and The Hamar Concert (both NXN, 2023). Berg is also heard to advantage in ...

Album Review

Andre Roligheten: Marbles

by Chris May
November 5, 2023

Tenor saxophonist André Roligheten is best known outside his native Norway, and wider Scandinavia, as a member of drummer Gard Nilssen's Acoustic Unity and as a composer/arranger in the berserker big band, Supersonic Orchestra. Nilssen returns the favour on Marbles, one of Roligheten's infrequent own-name releases. The album has grown out of a band Roligheten put together in spring 2021 for the Trondheim Jazz Festival, which had commissioned a new piece from him. The band was called ...

Liner Notes

Hanna Paulsberg Concept: Daughter Of The Sun

by Chris May
April 7, 2023

Ever since Jan Garbarek put Norwegian jazz on the map in the late 1980s, and even more so after the international success of his singularly ascetic Officium (ECM) in 1994, the music has acquired a reputation for being, if not entirely lacking in passion, then at least emotionally detached. Since the millennium, with the emergence of a new generation of musicians at the forefront of the electronica movement, showcased annually at Norway's influential Punkt festival, the country's jazz has, justly ...

Liner Notes

Gard Nilssen's Acoustic Unity: To Whom Who Buys A Record

by Chris May
March 17, 2023

In July 2019, Gard Nilssen will be Artist-in-Residence at the prestigious, future-facing Molde Jazz Festival. It will be a busy week for the Norwegian drummer, composer and sonic adventurer. As well as guest appearances, he will perform with several of his bands--SpaceMonkey, an electronica/dance music mash-up he co-founded five years ago; Bushman's Revenge, which may be the missing link between Albert Ayler and Black Sabbath and which he co-founded in 2003; the more recently formed Amgala Temple, which draws comparisons ...

Liner Notes

Espen Berg Trio: Free To Play

by Chris May
February 3, 2023

If you ask a jazz fan to name the greatest piano-trio albums ever made, the probability is that their top twenty choices will include most, if not all, of the following: Erroll Garner's Concert By The Sea (Columbia, 1955), Ahmad Jamal's But Not For Me (Argo, 1958), Bill Evans's Sunday At The Village Vanguard (Riverside, 1961), Keith Jarrett's Standards Volume 2 (ECM, 1983) and Brad Mehldau's The Art Of The Trio Vol. 1 (Warner Bros., 1996), or in the cases ...

Liner Notes

Gard Nilssen's Supersonic Orchestra: If You Listen Carefully The Music Is Yours

by Chris May
January 18, 2023

Fasten your seat belt, please. Get ready for the full tilt, barely tamed, beautiful monster that is Gard Nilssen's sixteen-piece Supersonic Orchestra. Audacious and experimentalist, like everything the Norwegian drummer and composer touches, Supersonic flouts convention and, in particular, realigns the longstanding relationship between pre-composition and improvisation in orchestral jazz. If You Listen Carefully The Music Is Yours, its debut, was recorded live at the adventurous Molde International Jazz Festival in 2019, where Nilssen was Artist in Residence. The band's ...