Daniel Herskedal lives in one of the coldest places in Norway. The virtuoso brass player, an acclaimed if somewhat unlikely star of European jazz, recently moved to Røros, an old copper-mining town and Unesco World Heritage site in the mountains near the border with Sweden.
“Røros is around 650m above sea level, so it’s not super high, but it’s far from the coast and it gets cold enough. I think the record is minus-50 degrees,” Herskedal says from his music studio in the town. “We even had minus degrees in August this year, though only during the night and only for a couple of days. And from early October to late May we have snow. But the cold suits me. You can go skiing, the snow reflects more of the light, and it’s easier not to get too winter-depressed.”
As well as photographs showing the 43-year-old sporting a classic Scandi jumper in a frozen northern landscape, and album titles that range from Call for Winter to A Single Sunbeam and Out of the Fog, his geographical location and climatic observations seem to perfectly match the music he makes.
An innovator on the sonorous if sometimes unwieldy tuba, as well as the resonant and W Heath Robinson – like bass trumpet, Herskedal creates “gorgeously hypnotic” music that marries cool Nordic jazz and improvisation with the warmer melodies and rhythms of folk, classical, ambient and traditional music.
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The results are expansive, expressive and often supremely cinematic. They also defy expectation. On the 10 albums that Herskedal has released over the past decade on the “accessibly adventurous” British label Edition Records, his compositions often move from light and nimble to dark and dangerous, sometimes within the same tune.
It’s little surprise, then, that his music has been widely used in film, theatre, dance and podcast projects. Or that it works so well live, especially in a solo setting – during which he often layers, through innovative technical and electronic effects, rumbling drones and vocalised flights – and in a highly interactive trio format.
In a rare visit to Ireland this month, Herskedal appears with the pianist Helge Lien and the percussionist Helge Andreas Norbakken on a five-date Music Network tour.
Herskedal grew up in a place of similar appeal to Røros: the coastal town of Molde. “It’s on a very beautiful fjord, and from the house I lived in I could see across to 222 mountaintops – so that’s my normal,” he says. “As a child, it was the perfect place for hiking, fishing, cycling and being in nature. But, also, it had a big jazz festival.”
While ardent soccer fans know Molde as the Norwegian club from which Ole Gunnar Solskjær moved to Manchester United, in music circles the town has an equally outsized fame as the location of one of the oldest and best jazz festivals in Europe. Government-funded, it has also always attracted big names, from both sides of the Atlantic.
Herskedal is the son of an artist mother and journalist father who had three older brothers, all of whom played brass instruments; he joined his primary-school band at the age of eight (an enlightened and common practice in Norway), taking up the tenor horn.
He also started attending the jazz festival, at 10 hearing the lyrical Danish trumpet player and composer Palle Mikkelborg. “I can still feel the sensation of being at that concert,” Herskedal says. “Palle later became one of my most important influences, and I studied a little with him, because he helped me in my search for my own sound. Though that process was going on right back then.”
Encouraged, against his will, to switch to the higher-pitched French horn, because the instrument better suited his school’s wind ensemble, Herskedal decided to abandon music and focus on his other schoolboy passion, boxing. As a last resort the conductor of the band persuaded him to try the tuba.
“I have a very visual memory of taking the instrument home, going into my room and producing deeper and deeper notes, and thinking, yes, this is it!” he says. “It made me realise that I didn’t care what type of music I was playing or listening to; I just wanted to feel those frequencies and vibrations, those deep bass sounds. It was like a whole-body experience, a physical thing.”
By 13 Herskedal was taking part in workshops and street parades organised by the jazz festival, events that introduced him both to improvisation and to membership of a New Orleans-style Dixieland band. Later, in addition to Mikkelborg’s music, he began to listen avidly to such modern Norwegian jazz masters as the trumpeters Arve Henriksen and Nils Petter Molvær and the saxophonist Jan Garbarek. Herskedal had both found his instrument and his music.
He had also found a sanctuary. His parents had divorced when he was two, and he says that, as a shy and insecure teenager, he struggled. “Playing music, I was able to escape those difficult thoughts and feelings,” he says. “I could just be in a space where I could enjoy and experience things better than in the real world.”
From 2002 to 2006 Herskedal studied first classical then jazz at the music conservatory in Trondheim. He completed a master’s in jazz tuba in Copenhagen, where one of his professors was the British keyboard and tenor horn player, and musical free spirit, Django Bates, and he began to concentrate more on composition. His ambitious large-scale works have since been performed by ensembles ranging from the Russian Patriarchate Choir of Moscow to the BBC Concert Orchestra.
Herskedal’s thesis was on the intersections between jazz and yoik, the shamanic-like form of singing and cultural expression performed by the far-northern Sámi people that is one of the oldest continuous musical traditions in Europe. It led to him taking new directions.
“At some point during my studies I became frustrated with playing the tuba, with how, whether you’re a classical or jazz musician, there are certain traditions and expectations about how you should sound and the music you should play,” he says. “So I started travelling to countries where I could meet new musicians and explore Arabic, Balkan and Latin music.”
It not only opened up a whole new world of possibilities for Herskedal but also helped him find his singular musical voice, one that lands in a liminal space between jazz, classical and folk.
“You can always educate yourself as a jazz or classical musician, but in folk music you really have to grow up with it and learn from your community,” he says. “It’s like a time machine: it survives by being passed down from generation to generation – and it’s the most real thing you can have in music, a quality that is a huge inspiration to me. I often think of myself as a traditional musician without a tradition.”
Herskedal also began performing with Sámi vocalists in Norway, including the singer Marja Mortensson, who is now, he says, “my better half and the mother of our children”. The couple moved to Røros, which is about two hours south of Trondheim, because it is one of only two places in the country where the language spoken in the local kindergarten is South Sámi. (There are many different linguistic types and variants.) Herskedal too is now learning the language. “It’s superfragile – only around 500 people in Norway speak South Sámi – so it felt like the least I could do.”
Herskedal is thoughtful and sensitive, cheerful and introverted, and his highly original soundworld often reflects these qualities. He was once asked what five words best describe his music, and he replied, “melodic, deep, peaceful, cinematic and honest”. Of those, the perception of calmness and tranquillity seems the attribute to which his admirers most readily respond. There can be thunder and turbulence in his low sounds, but they are invariably counterpointed by a sense of space, a pause for breath and reflection.
“I think what I look for in music is what’s missing,” he says. “I find a lot of trouble in the world, but in music, just like when I was younger, I can escape and find peace somehow. I mean, my music can be complicated, but it shouldn’t be stressful, because everything else in the world is stressful enough. So take away that and enter this world instead. I’m hoping it’s a place you’ll want to stay in.”
The Daniel Herskedal Trio play Dublin, Limerick, Dún Laoghaire, Cork and Sligo between Tuesday, October 21st, and Sunday, October 26th, on a Music Network tour
Five great editions
Since it was founded, in 2008, by the pianist Dave Stapleton, the British independent jazz label Edition Records has built an impressive international roster of new and established artists, and released almost 300 albums. Here are five recent favourites.
Dave Holland: Another Land (2021) One of jazz’s great bassists – Holland played in Miles Davis’s groundbreaking electric groups of the late 1960s and early 1970s – leads an easy-going, groove-based trio with the guitarist Kevin Eubanks and the drummer Obed Calvaire.
Fergus McCreadie: Forest Floor (2022) The Scottish prodigy received a Mercury Prize nomination for this evocative piano-trio album that skilfully combines powerhouse improvisation with contemplative folk themes.
The Bad Plus: The Bad Plus (2022) First album of the reconfigured “avant-garde populist” outfit that energetically adds the tenor saxophonist Chris Speed and the guitarist Ben Monder to its stalwart original members Reid Anderson, on bass, and Dave King, on drums.
Eyolf Dale: The Wayfarers (2023) A trio recording by the Norwegian pianist (and regular Daniel Herskedal collaborator) that brilliantly captures the leader’s compelling lyricism and rhythmic vitality.
Snowpoet: Heartstrings (2025) The duo of the Dublin-born and London-based vocalist and lyricist Lauren Kinsella and the keyboardist and producer Chris Hyson make richly immersive music that mixes jazz, electronic and folk with tender songwriting.
