If I were to reveal that 'I Could Have Killed Him in the Sauna' came a close second to my chosen one, you could take a pretty good stab as to the provenance of this approximately ten-piece group. They certainly were a dectet at the time of their first album to be issued outside their native Norway: 2002's A Livingroom Hush, which came out on Ninja Tune to some serious critical acclaim. The NME, for example, called it 'a brilliant record reminiscent of Tortoise in their evening wear.' The Independent on Sunday considered it 'a cohesive mixture of Herbie Hancock's 1970s keyboards excursions, Tortoise and Stereolab's post-rock guitar blues.' Most concisely and memorably, Sleaze Nation likened the group's music to 'Charles Mingus with Aphex Twin up his arse.' BBC listeners named it 'Jazz Albumof the Year'.
The group themselves cite John Coltrane, Robert Wyatt, Soft Machine and Talk Talk among other influences. All of which suggests how tricky – and probably pointless – it is to label their quirky, distinctive brand of music. Based on my own listening, since finding the follow-up to Livingroom, the brilliant The Stix, going for a solitary euro in a sale way back in the noughties, I would plump for 'prog-jazz'. Without taking up an entire side of an LP or engaging in the wearisome, self-indulgent longueurs of Yes, Van der Graaf Generator and others of that kidney, it's music that eschews conventional structures for something that stretches and evolves even within the framework of a single four-minute number, creating tension as it switches time signatures and builds up to premature climaxes before subsiding into passages of serene beauty: a kind of sonic sketch, perhaps, of the dramatic Norwegian coastline. There's more than a hint of Frank Zappa at his most symphonic on albums like The Grand Wazoo or numbers like 'Son of Mr. Green Genes'. The instrumentation is similarly idiosyncratic: vibes, marimba, alto flute, baritone sax, trombone, trumpet, tuba, for example, harmonise with guitars and electronic keyboards. It's music, in other words, that's bursting with ideas and creativity.
Most of Jaga Jazzist's repertoire seems to be composed by the brothers Horntveth: exuberant drummer and 'gentle giant' Martin, and especially multi-instrumentalist Lars, whose solo album Pooka is as good if not better than The Stix. 'Day' is Martin's piece, while 'Another Day' is Lars's, as is the wonderfully entitled 'I Could Have Killed Him in the Sauna' – and all three numbers appear on The Stix.
One of the most impressive and surprising thing about the live performances on YouTube is just how well they translate the intricacy of the studio sound to the context of a concert: a close but not literal translation, just different enough to allow for the unexpected. Like Zappa's live performances, there's room for a certain amount of improvisation, but only within a tight and well-rehearsed framework. There's a heart-stopping moment around the 1 minute 50 seconds mark, for example, where everything appears to have stopped abruptly, as if someone has played a bum note so startling that they want to abandon ship and begin again, only for the music to shift suddenly up a gear into one of their trademark soaring crescendos, which seems visibly to pump adrenaline into the whole crew, before subsiding once more. Then, a single trumpet blast splits the two numbers and a flute carries the melody of 'Another Day', before the trumpet again shifts direction with the nearest thing to a conventional jazz solo. After a couple of sublime key changes, we end not with a bang but with a trumpet's whimper. Et voilà! Seven exhilarating minutes of gorgeous melodic passages married to urgent, infectious rhythm.
I lost touch with the band after finding A Livingroom Hush for a similar knock-down price. I caught up with them again not long after Live With Britten Sinfonia came out in 2013, but found that a full orchestra rather swamped what I had found so unique and compelling about their music. Studio albums either side of it have apparently been more rock-oriented, emphasising the progressive elements at the expense of the jazz. In an interview, Martin Horntveth explained that the band toured a lot after releasing Livingroom and some of the original members quit the band around 2005 when they decided to take a break from the routine. Sister Line on tuba and a few of the other long-timers are still with them, playing music that Martin describes as 'complex, sometimes corny, sometimes beautiful, but most of all fun-to-play.' Fun to play and fun to watch.
