Underground jazz ventures overground

When most people hear the word “jazz”, they generally think of hip black Americans in suits playing lots of notes to a half-empty basement. And 60 years ago, they would have been half-right. What you almost certainly aren’t thinking of, unless you happened to be at the recent Match & Fuse festival in Oslo, is overdriven guitar noise, frenetic light shows and sub-bass frequencies that could level a small town.

Match & Fuse began life two years ago as a gleam in the eye of Dave Morecroft, of the London-based "skronk jazz" group World Service Project. They were facing the same challenge that young jazz musicians everywhere face: how to move from a local scene to an international stage when you play a brand of music that sends most civilians running for the exit. So Morecroft, a keyboardist, began reaching out to like-minded musicians around Europe, putting together tours that matched local and visiting bands, playing one set each, and then fusing into a "supergroup" for a collaborative third set. And, crucially, keeping the J-word under the counter.

“We don’t use the word ‘jazz’ anywhere, except when it’s collected together with other genres,” says Morecroft. “We want young people to come along who wouldn’t ever think they would enjoy something called jazz.”

What began as a series of one-off tours has grown into an international co-operative with partner musicians around Europe and, now, a free annual festival that brings the Match & Fuse concept out of the basement and into the open air. The underground is going overground.

The drummer Matthew Jacobson, Match & Fuse’s man in Ireland and a founder of the contemporary music label Diatribe, was one of the early adopters. His band, Redivider, have already matched and fused with World Service Project. Standing in St Hanshaugen Park in Oslo listening to Diatribe’s latest signing, the Dublin band OKO, laying down their deep grooves for a young and appreciative audience, he is enthusiastic about the Match & Fuse model.

“It’s a really simple artist-based idea, hooking up with a band from another scene, sharing their audience, sharing their knowledge, and then sharing music when you get up and play together. We’re building it from the ground up.”

It's appropriate that the second festival should happen in Norway, one of the cradles of new European jazz since musicians such as the saxophonist Jan Garbarek emerged with the "Nordic sound" in the 1970s. Match & Fuse's Norwegian partner, Eirik Tofte, is anything but reverential about the Scandinavian sound. "The Nordic scene has been known for all that soundscape jazz, what I would call almost boring jazz, but in the freer parts of the music, in the noise scene, a lot of musicians are coming out of the Norwegian Academy of Music, in Oslo, and the Trondheim Conservatory of Music. These schools are not old, so they are not bound to traditions."

When you listen to Norwegian bands such as the Krautrock-meets-acoustic-folk septet Karokh, and the noise-punk trio Ich Bin Nintendo, Garbarek's wail seems little more than a distant echo. The idea of the virtuoso soloist is being jettisoned in favour of a group aesthetic that, while still putting improvisation in the foreground, has a lot more to do with rock music. Jazz may still be the medium through which these young players learn their craft, and the well-funded Norwegian scene turns them out in great numbers, but when they come to create their own sound it's more likely to be informed by noise punk, math rock and death metal than by a Manhattan basement. John Coltrane it ain't.

And yet one can’t help thinking Coltrane would approve of the directness of these new European musicians. Although most of the bands on this year’s bill reflect Tofte’s taste for blistering volume, there are other new genres on the Hanshaugen stage. The Norwegian trio Gurlz charm the early crowd with archly feminist pop pastiches. Skadedyr, the weekend’s largest and sweetest-sounding ensemble, prove Trondheim turns out more than guitarists. And the Toulouse ensemble Alfie Ryner, sporting the festival’s only suits, artfully blend throbbing bass lines with Arabic melodies and acerbic monologues.

Backstage, OKO's guitarist, Shane Latimer, reflects on this sea change in European jazz. For him it's about conversations with the past, with the future, with other musicians and with the audience.

“You can certainly hear a conversation at Match & Fuse between the bands. Okay, the conversation seems to be that it should be loud and rocking, but it’s a conversation. It’s about trying to find something that’s essential, something that people have a feeling for.”

And that’s jazz.