More Fun, Please: Paal Nilssen-Love at Oslo's Only Connect festival

Paal Nilssen-Love Extra Large Unit 

“more fun, please”

Only Connect Festival, Oslo

May 20, 2017

Anne Hilde Neset, the artistic director of the 5-year-old Only Connect Festival in Oslo, Norway, introduced Paal Nilssen-Love’s Extra Large Unit by saying that for years she’d been trying to get the drummer to “write more stuff down. For the final set of her final year with the festival, she got her wish. Nilssen-Love supplemented his 12-piece Large Unit with 20 students from the Norwegian Academy of Music to present a 30-minute suite of groove, humor and historical referencing. 

The players were spread across the floor of the Marmorsalen theater in the Sentralen – a posh, newly opened arts center in an old bank building near the city center – with scattered audience seating just beyond them, so that that players and spectators were very nearly sitting together. 

The piece, “more fun please,”  seemed an endless succession of cues and causation. It started after an extended silence with a trombone blast and a piano smash and then a quick scattering of isolated events until a vague arabesque emitted from a standing violinist. The blasts continued including from electronicist Tommi Keränen , Nilssen-Love’s secret weapon in the group. The violin dance seemed to soothe the beast – first one of the three pianos joined in and in short order everyone had followed into a quiet rumble.

There then followed a remarkable meditation for flute and two accordions (one in drone, the other seeming to pop reeds, if that’s possible) before Nilssen-Love began cuing unison blasts, which seemed to kickstart a vibraphone, playing something quicker but rather in keeping with the flute song. One of the student pianists started playing in opposition to the vibes but quIckly 180’d, then two drummers and four bassists pushing into free jazz territory. A cadre of horns stormed in and the Very Large Unit began to resemble (in sound, not size) the Cecil Taylor Unit that preceded it. 

Before one could ask the stale question about composition vs improvisation, they headed into a bit of circus music. Was Nilssen-Love teasing the question? Was he intentionally messing with the idea of composition in jazz by moving from a Taylor mode through a moment of Nino Rota and headlong into a Mingus-inspired subsection? Was he raising the hackneyed notion of live improvisation vs sterile documentation by having electronics and trumpet players cue separate halves of the band with vinyl records onto which written cues were taped: PAC-MAN; TEQUILA; BEAUTY; VOFF!; 8, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6; an arrow pointing upward, a cartoon of a ghost, or FUCK TRUMP (the last one being promptly smashed)?

There was, in any event, a score on a stand in front of each of the musicians, with pages combining traditional and graphic notation, and the players certainly referred to them at least some of the time, and do so there was something actually written down on paper. And from the faces of the students and Unit members after the piece concluded, there was fun to be had, and no doubt a wish for more.

- Kurt Gottschalk (text and photos)  

My report on the rest of the Only Connect festival can be read at I Care If You Listen.