While the Norwegian jazz scene has been pursuing its own course for decades, the period of 1996-1997 represented a significant watershed, a milestone where an entirely new kind of music emerged, linked to jazz but distanced considerably—some might say completely, but they'd be mistaken—from its roots in the American tradition. Three seminal and groundbreaking albums were released within a year of each other: trumpeter Nils Petter Molvær's Khmer (ECM, 1997); noise improv group Supersilent's 1- 3 (Rune Grammofon, 1997); and, beating the others by a year, keyboardist Bugge Wesseltoft's aptly titled New Conception of Jazz (Jazzland, 1996). All three explored the integration of electronics, disparate cultural references, programming, turntables and—especially in the case of Supersilent, the most avant-garde of the three— noise, to create aural landscapes that were innovative, otherworldly and refreshingly new. The three releases created a unified shot across the bow that announced, in no uncertain terms, that something new was happening, something was changing, and that jazz and improvised music would never be the same again.
Of the three releases, New Conception of Jazz was, perhaps, the most user-friendly; a combination of dance floor beats, relentless grooves and solos couched within, at times, accessible but almost subversively challenging changes, Wesseltoft's "New Conception of Jazz" (NCOJ) became an imprint that spawned a series of albums— Sharing (1998), Moving (2001), Live (2003) and Film Ing (2004), all on the keyboardist's burgeoning Jazzland label. Over the course of these albums, Wesseltoft gradually expanded the purview of his NCOJ. While the electronica-drenched grooves of songs like "Somewhere in Between" and "Change" may have mistakenly pigeonholed Wesseltoft's music as sacrilegious to the jazz police, looking under the covers revealed an unmistakable sound that was, at least in part, influenced by pianist and icon Herbie Hancock's electric music—Head Hunters (Columbia, 1973) updated, perhaps, for an approaching and ultimately occurring new millennium.
But NCOJ was always about something more, and New Conception of Jazz Box—a generous three-CD set, with an additional DVD that features a NCOJ collaboration with oudist/vocalist Dhafer Youssef at Montreux in 2004—demonstrates just how much. It not only sets the record straight on the diversity of the concept, but positions Wesseltoft—alongside Norwegians contemporaries including fellow keyboardists Christian Wallumrød and Ståle Storløkken, trumpeters Molvær and Arve Henriksen, guitarist Eivind Aarset, drummers Audun Kleive and Thomas Strønen, singer Sidsel Endresen and turntablist Pål "DJ Strangefruit" Nyhus—as an artist who has gained considerable cachet everywhere but, curiously, the United States. It's time for that to change.
