Jazz Articles about Ola Kvernberg

About Ola Kvernberg

Album Review

Daniel Herskedal: A Single Sunbeam

Read "A Single Sunbeam" reviewed by Geno Thackara

by Geno Thackara
March 13, 2024

What Del Close did for the art of improv comedy or Jacques Torres for the art of chocolate, Daniel Herskedal does for the tuba. An occasional star such as Bob Stewart has taken the instrument somewhere fresh outside the time-honored contexts of orchestra or marching band, but it is another thing to make the entire tradition feel new--good luck trying to name anyone else who could adapt the tuba to chill-ambient, Arabian travelogue and Norwegian yoik chanting with equal skill. ...

Liner Notes

Ola Kvernberg & The Trondheim Soloists: The Mechanical Fair Live

by Chris May
February 24, 2023

Ola Kvernberg's Steamdown (Grappa) was perhaps the most sensationally visceral album to come our way during 2018. Part future-jazz, part EDM, part avant-rock, part contemporary-classical and 100% wrap-around shamanistic. It was Kvernberg's follow-up to The Mechanical Fair (Jazzland, 2014), which is here in an extensively recalibrated version recorded live at the Molde International Jazz Festival in 2016. There are similarities between Steamdown and The Mechanical Fair Live, as you would expect of works coming from the same ...

Liner Notes

Ola Kvernberg: Steamdome II The Hypogean

by Chris May
January 24, 2023

Violinist and multi-instrumentalist Ola Kvernberg was born into a line of Norwegian folk musicians which includes the distinguished fiddler and composer Peter Larrson Rypdal. Kvernberg cut his teeth playing in traditional bands led by his parents and began studying classical violin when he was nine. In his early twenties, after discovering jazz, he spent a few years with Gypsy jazz specialists Hot Club de Norvège. Next, he broadened his horizons with a series of modernistic own-name releases which began with ...

Album Review

Ola Kvernberg: Steamdome

by Chris May
June 13, 2018

Steamdome is one of those albums that defies categorisation. It is part future-jazz, part avant-rock, part deep-house, part electronica, part contemporary-classical. It is the follow-up to Norwegian violinist and film composer Ola Kvernberg's whirlwind The Mechanical Fair (Olsen, 2016). That album was memorably pitched as heralding a “mutton western" genre, and the description also fits Steamdome, which winningly references some of Ennio Morricone's compositional tropes. There are a couple of substantial differences between the two albums. The first is that ...

Extended Analysis

Ola Kvernberg Trio: Northern Tapes

by John Kelman
April 13, 2014

It's been three years since Ola Kvernberg released the ambitious Liarbird (Jazzland, 2011), a studio document of his 2010 Molde International Jazz Festival commission where guest Joshua Redman was recruited for the live performance, but where, far more than a ringer for Kvernberg, Redman was clearly awestruck by this virtuosic young violinist/composer. It's not that Kvernberg hasn't been busy, either: in addition to being a featured soloist, the same year, with Motorpsycho's progressive rock-heavy collaboration with Supersilent/Elephant9 keyboardist Ståle Storløkken, ...

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Album Review

Ola Kvernberg: Liarbird

by John Kelman
November 7, 2011

It may have seemed that recruiting American saxophonist Joshua Redman for the live premiere of Liarbird--a joint commission by the Trondheim and Molde Jazz Festivals in Norway--was the musical equivalent of a ringer in sports. But it wasn't long into Ola Kvernberg's ambitious Molde Jazz 2010 performance, as the violinist launched into the first of many staggeringly fine solos, that Redman's appreciation for the players around him became clear--his expression, for most of the show, one of sheer amazement. And ...

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Album Review

Ola Kvernberg Trio: Folk

by John Kelman
April 23, 2009

Beginning his career playing Manouche music, Norwegian violinist/mandolinist Ola Kvernberg has recently been exploring more modernistic spaces with his trio featuring bassist Steinar Raknes and drummer Erik Nylander. Folk is the follow-up to the trio's 2006 Jazzland debut, Night Driver, and the same loose interplay is on display, but with greater confidence and depth--the clear result of more time spent together. “Roland" is based around a repetitive riff and contemporary funk groove, but what's remarkable is how Kvernberg ...