Jazz Articles about Sigurd Hole

About Sigurd Hole

Album Review

Sigurd Hole's Elvesang enacts the crossing of a threshold where music loosens its claim on sound alone and begins to behave like weather, memory, and landscape thinking aloud. Recorded in the small Ytre Rendal church near Lake Lomnessjøen, not far from Hole's childhood home in Rendalen, the album carries the unmistakable feeling of return. Not nostalgia exactly, but a deeper settling, as if the bass itself remembers the grain of the wood around it and the cold air pressing against ...

Album Review

Sigurd Hole Trio: Encounters

Read "Encounters" reviewed by Tyran Grillo

by Tyran Grillo
January 4, 2026

Encounters unfolds as a single, patiently breathed arc rather than a sequence of events. From the outset, the trio situates itself firmly in the world, not observing it from a distance but moving within it, attentive to texture, ritual, and change. Sigurd Hole's compositional voice is quietly astonishing in this regard and finds life-giving partnership in violinist Hakon Aase (also playing kantele) and drummer Jarle Vespestad. He writes music that feels discovered rather than imposed, as though these forms were ...

Album Review

Sigurd Hole ensemble: Extinction Sounds

Read "Extinction Sounds" reviewed by David Bruggink

by David Bruggink
January 27, 2025

Sigurd Hole has proven himself a composer to watch with a string of releases blurring the lines between chamber jazz, modern classical composition and experimentation, often feeling more like organic transmissions than conventional songs. His solo double album Lys / Mørke (Self Produced, 2020) was recorded on the isolated Norwegian island of Fleinvær, and brings the intonations of its birds and biting winds into conversation with the similarly textural manipulations of his bowed and plucked bass. On the striking ensemble recording Roraima ...

Album Review

Sigurd Hole: Roraima

Read "Roraima" reviewed by David Bruggink

by David Bruggink
March 29, 2022

Norwegian upright bassist Sigurd Hole has stood out in the recent past as both a contributor (with his elegant performance on Tord Gustavsen's 2018 ECM album, The Other Side) and bandleader (through his 2018 Elvesang album Encounters). His solo explorations are equally noteworthy, as on the wide-ranging double album Lys / Mørke (Elvesang, 2020). Recorded on the remote arctic islands of Fleinvær, he thoughtfully probed the relationship between the high-pitched harmonics and drones of his instrument and the spectral winds ...

Album Review

Sigurd Hole: Elvesang

by John Kelman
February 17, 2018

Sigurd Hole has already built a strong reputation, in his native Norway, for his work with Eple Trio on albums including The Widening Sphere of Influence (NORCD, 2008), in addition to the trio's collaborations with NORCD label head/saxophonist/goat horn master Karl Seglem on albums like NORSKjazz.no (NORCD, 2012). The double bassist has also collaborated with guitarist Jon Eberson (criminally undervalued outside of Norway) and pianist Helge Lien, and has built a busy schedule as a recording and touring musician, in ...

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Album Review

Kallerdahl / Seglem / Ulvo / Hole / Sjovaag: Skoddeheimen

Read "Skoddeheimen" reviewed by John Kelman

by John Kelman
April 14, 2010

With NORSKjazz.no (Ozella Music, 2009), veteran saxophonist, producer, label head and goat horn virtuoso Karl Seglem brought a distinctive Norwegian flavor to the conventional sax/piano/bass/drums format. By recruiting younger players, Seglem ensured the continuance of his country's jazz tradition--one as imbued by folkloric elements and dark classicism as it is the American vernacular--through the increasingly endangered process of mentoring. For NORSKJazz.no, Seglem enlisted the preexistent chemistry of Eple Trio, whose The Widening Sphere of Influence, released on Seglem's own NORCD ...