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Knut Kvifte Nesheim – Graosido
The Norwegian mountains have always possessed a peculiar magnetism for Scandinavian musicians, their imposing silhouettes serving as both muse and metaphor for the austere beauty that characterises the region's most compelling contemporary jazz. Knut Kvifte Nesheim's latest offering with the Norwegian Jazz Orchestra OJKOS finds the drummer-composer gazing across Lake Løna toward the distant peak of Graosido—literally "grey side"—and discovering within its weathered countenance a mirror for the ensemble's own mercurial nature.

The album's conceptual framework proves surprisingly robust. Each composition bears a title drawn from the Voss dialect, those distinctive words that capture natural phenomena with the precision of a landscape painter's brush. The music itself navigates similar territory, moving between intimate chamber passages and more expansive orchestral statements with the kind of assurance that suggests deep familiarity with both idioms.


Nesheim's drumming remains the album's gravitational centre, though he resists the temptation to dominate proceedings. His rhythmic conception owes clear debts to Norwegian folk traditions—the ghost of Hardanger fiddle rhythms haunts several tracks—yet his integration of these elements never feels calculated or ethnomusicologically dutiful. The interplay with OJKOS reveals a collective that has matured considerably over its five-year existence, each voice contributing to a whole that manages to be both democratically inclusive and artistically focused.


The recording quality deserves particular mention. The spatial relationships between instruments mirror the album's thematic preoccupations with distance and proximity, reflection and reality. When the ensemble swells to full orchestral dimensions, individual voices remain distinct yet interdependent, much like the way mountain peaks emerge from and dissolve back into their surrounding landscape.


Graosido succeeds admirably in its modest ambitions. Nesheim has created a work that functions both as personal geography and collective statement, a musical cartography that maps not just the contours of a beloved landscape but the equally complex terrain of creative collaboration. Like its titular mountain, the album stands firm while seeming perpetually on the verge of transformation—a paradox that lies at the heart of all enduring art.