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About Jaga Jazzist
Instrument: Band / ensemble / orchestra
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by John Kelman
It's hard to believe that Norway's Jaga Jazzist is celebrating its 20th anniversary this year, in 2014. Not that there aren't other groups that have lasted as long, but look for a group whose primary composer was just 14 when the whole thing began, find a band where five out of its eight current members were there when everything started in 1994, and scope out one that has managed to remain as stylistically enigmatic and impossible to categorize as... well, ...
read moreBig Ears Festival 2018
by Mark Sullivan
Big Ears Festival Knoxville, TN March 22-25, 2018 Knoxville's Big Ears Festival has traditionally kicked things off with a big piece by a high-visibility headliner. This year was to have featured a live performance of guitarist Nels Cline's Lovers project, an ambitious re-imagination of romantic “mood music" which was to be performed with the Knoxville Jazz Orchestra and guest soloists. But the Spring snowstorms across the Northeast had other ideas, making travel too difficult to allow ...
read moreTake Five with Lars Horntveth of Jaga Jazzist
by Lars Horntveth
About Jaga Jazzist If Jaga has any rules, there's really just one: every album must sound like nothing that preceded it. With Starfire, the group that has confounded categorization from inception has delivered yet another album unlike any they've ever done before. Yet, at the end of the day--despite touchstones ranging from Gil Evans to Radiohead, My Bloody Valentine to Tortoise, Oslo 13 to Motorpsycho and Fela Kuti to Steve Reich--Starfire still sounds absolutely like nobody but Jaga ...
read moreJaga Jazzist: Starfire
by Alex Franquelli
First things first: let's leave the definition of Jaga Jazzist music for last. Or, better, let's not even consider using labels. Let's not rush to conclusions, let's not fall in the sweet traps of music criticism where one plunges in forced by adjectives, hyperboles, comparisons, clever rhetoric and assorted namedropping. First things first, we said, as if it were easy to define an ensemble which has rewritten the history of European contemporary jazz by adding progressive, noise, classical and electronic ...
read moreJaga Jazzist: Live with Britten Sinfonia
by Phil Barnes
Norwegian collective Jaga Jazzist don't sit comfortably within genre boundaries. Their earlier UK Ninja Tune releases like A Livingroom Hush (2001) and The Stix (2003) suggested a marriage of jazz texture with glitchy, breakbeat driven electronica in a way that was both diverting and interesting, if likely to incite the wrath of the more traditional jazz fan were it to be described as more than “jazz influenced." Later records such as 2005's What We Must and 2008's One Armed Bandit ...
read moreJaga Jazzist: Live with Britten Sinfonia
by John Kelman
Norway's Jaga Jazzist has always been difficult to pigeonhole. Despite the word “jazz" in the nonet's moniker, its principle writer, multi-instrumentalist Lars Horntveth, has cited everyone from Steve Reich, Rick Wakeman, Dungen and Spirit to Fela Kuti, King Crimson, MGMT and Air as influences on the group's last studio record, One-Armed Bandit (Ninja Tune, 2010). Horntveth is also a fan of jazz arrangers/composers like Gil Evans, so it's not that Jaga Jazzist doesn't have jazz in its DNA; it's just ...
read moreJaga Jazzist: Maximalistic
by Angela Shawn-Chi Lu
A Norwegian nonet that rocks 35 instruments onstage and smashes Afrobeat, prog, film music, cheesy fanfares and Steve Reich arpeggios together against a backdrop of gigantic slot machine fruit? The odds of that happening are “No friggin way!" But as it turns out, one such nonet does exist. What's even more shocking is that Jaga Jazzist (pronounced “yaga yazzist") has made this demented formula supremely successful. Over its 17-year career, Jaga Jazzist has garnered international and critical ...
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