We get plenty of bedroom pop on NMC but not so much living room jazz.
That’s exactly what the Liv Andrea Hauge Trio did in 2022 when she/they released the album ‘Live from St. Hanshaugen’ (an upmarket area of Oslo), which was recorded in Liv’s living room and went on to be hailed as one of the year’s best Norwegian jazz records.
A year on and the trio will release their second album – which is also their first studio album – ‘Ville Blomster’ (‘Wildflowers’) – and this is the first song from that album, called ‘Gullregn’, (‘Golden Rain’), which is said to draw inspiration from the Keith Jarrett Trio, Jarrett being a composer of over 100 albums, a multi-instrumentalist, and inventor of several musical styles.
The first album was recorded rapidly but this one took a year of collaboration and not a little bit of touring, and allows for improvisation, the title representative of their wilder side.
She wrote ‘Gullregn’ at home in Oslo one evening when unable to attend a party she’d been invited to and in search of something happy while paradoxically remaining sad and it was heavily inspired by Keith Jarrett’s ‘My back pages’, originally a Bob Dylan song.
I often feel like a fraud when writing about jazz as it is a style I don’t really understand properly, being typically instrumental only and with few of the peaks and troughs and emotions you would expect to find say in an indie-pop or –rock piece with or without vocals.
What I’m usually reduced to is finding an analogy and the go to, if you’ll pardon the pun, is GoGo Penguin, who employ a similar piano/double bass/drums structure, with minimal piano which rapidly gains altitude, sometimes explosively and can change direction abruptly.
Liv Andrea Hauge Trio provides all that on this song, thank you very much.
The other thing they do very well is to find a rhythm and groove that is sometimes not so easy to locate in jazz, and in this one for the most part they could be Singing in that Golden Rain, while the contrasting outro isn’t that dissimilar to the cool vibe of Mike Post’s theme for Hill Street Blues.
The album will be released on 2nd February 2024on the HUBRO label.
The trio are:
Liv Andrea Hauge (piano)
Georgia Wartel Collins (bass)
August Glännerstrand (drums)
Find Liv Andrea Hauge on:
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/livandrea.hauge
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/livandreahauge/
There is also the separate Liv Andrea Hauge Ensemble with a different crew, and whose more poppy single ‘Again’ was reviewed back in April.
