Knut Vaage – Røter

Knut Vaage: Røter

Bergen Big Band - Frode Grytten

Røter brings together the music of Knut Vaage, the poetry of Frode Grytten and the video art of Anne Marthe Dyvi. Commissioned and performed by Bergen Big Band, it is a work where jazz, poetry and image merge into something deeply human.

Vaage is a Bergen-based composer and pianist, trained at the Grieg Academy, who has long explored the borderland between improvisation and composition. His output spans symphonic works, opera and solo pieces, and in 2022 he was nominated for the Nordic Council Music Prize for Hybrid Spectacle. With Røter, he writes for Bergen Big Band, one of Norway’s leading big bands, gathering some of Western Norway’s foremost jazz musicians. Rooted in the 1970s and built on a strong commitment to new music, commissions and artistic collaboration, the band has shared the stage with international names such as Chris Potter, Diana Krall and Marius Neset. Røter is the band’s ninth release.

The work starts from the roots of jazz itself - a music born of migration, pain, resistance and cultural encounters - and turns toward our own time: people on the move, roots torn up, and new communities arising when cultures meet. Røter moves from fragile intimacy to explosive outbursts and driving jazz, from warm washes of sound and raw free-jazz energy to echoes of the classic big band tradition. Grytten’s distinctive poetic voice is woven seamlessly into the music, while Dyvi’s video art glides between its moods.

Premiered at the Bergen International Festival in 2022 to great acclaim, Røter was nominated for the 2024 Musikkforleggerprisen (Work of the Year).

If you have to ask what jazz is, you’ll never know. So said Louis Armstrong when he was asked if he could define jazz. No artist likes to define what they do. To define is often to reduce and degrade. Nor are there many jazz musicians who like the word jazz. What does it mean? Is it an abbreviation of ‘jasmine’, is it the scent of perfume and the taste of tea? Or does it refer to James, a mythical instrumentalist from an early phase of the form? 

Regardless, jazz was born of the blues in New Orleans, of the descendants of enslaved Americans. Jazz came of age in Chicago and along the banks of the Mississippi, jazz travelled from hot Chicago to the cool West Coast, sprinted down New York’s avenues, ended up in Paris in April, wandered through Tunisian nights, flew into Norwegian forests, landed atop mountain plateaus. Jazz was shot into outer space, found its way to inner spaces. Jazz is the music of the traveller — jazz moves, shifts, floats around, rises up, sinks down, finds paths and detours.  

It’s possible to call jazz America’s classical music. Simple as that. But it isn’t actually all that simple. Jazz is music that changed the art, a sound and a rhythm that changed the tradition, which changed the language and the world — yes, changed the world. Jazz isn’t just a people’s music, it’s the narrative of an entire century. Jazz expresses not just the bloody history of Black America, but the story of modern humanity. No less than that.

Jazz tells a story. The trumpeter tells a story. The drummer shares a lifetime. The saxophonist cooks up a towering skyscraper. The bassist composes an entire city. The band creates an entire civilisation. Jazz developed in a unique way, through a collaboration between musicians and their audiences, through a dialogue between younger and older performers. Up-and-coming musicians were the apprentices of established ones. In this sense, jazz has always been aware of the power in its roots. The new generation quotes the old, and the younger musicians are acutely aware of the tradition that has been laid at their feet.

At the same time, having your own sound and unique style is crucial in making a name for yourself within jazz. It’s one of the paradoxes of the form, that you attain the original and unique by imitating others, by absorbing and incorporating the history of jazz into yourself. You’re indebted to those who came before, but you have to use that debt to reach yourself. The music is your own experiences, your own thoughts, your own wisdom, your own stupidity. If you don’t live it, nor will it emerge from your horn or your strings or your keys or your drumheads.

Dizzy Gillespie said that sooner or later, a performer has to push himself into the music. Dizzy Gillespie wanted to be Roy Eldridge, to play like Roy Eldridge, sound like Roy Eldridge. At some point, he became Dizzy Gillespie. That’s how it is. Miles Davis wanted to be Dizzy Gillespie, to play like Dizzy, sound like Dizzy, but he couldn’t do it, he lacked the ability to hit the high notes like Dizzy, so he conjured up his own cool, beautiful, solitary sound. He became Miles Davis. Jon Hassell wanted to be Miles Davis, to be Miles Davis at his most electric, play like him, sound like him. At some point, Hassell went beyond his hero, he created a landscape free of borders and the trumpet’s rules, he painted the whole world with his instrument. He became Jon Hassell.

And after Jon Hassell? Well, here come Nils Petter Molvær and Arve Henriksen and Sam Gendel. And after them? Well, they’ll come, they’re on their way, they’re already here. Jazz runs in both directions, back to the source, back to the beginning, but also towards the mouth of the river and out into the sea. The old masters are immensely present in the music’s development and evolution, jazz has a sense of both past and present, it unfolds in an endless commute, an eternal shuttling between heaven and earth, between roots and spaceflight. And here we stand, Bergen Big Band and Knut Vaage and Anne Marthe Dyvi and I, the artists who have created this work. We who are indebted to the very best, the artists who made jazz such a vital form, a wild genre full of atonality and disharmony and noise, but jazz can take it, jazz can incorporate darkness, because jazz is also everything else — the warmth and harmony and rhythm. Jazz is freedom and joy, explosion and tradition, risk and roots.

Ask the members of Bergen Big Band, and maybe they won’t want to define jazz, but they’ll talk about Basie and Buddy, about Miles and Mingus and Monk, about Thad Jones and Donny McCaslin, about Art Tatum and Billie Holiday and Carla Bley. Ask Knut Vaage, and maybe he won’t want to define jazz, but he’ll talk about roots, about back when he ran Husnes Jazz Club and wrote jazz reviews for the local newspaper under a pseudonym. This is where he came from, from jazz, the man who would become a pianist and contemporary composer. Ask Anne Marthe Dyvi, and she’ll tell you about the female artists who came before and opened doors, the ones who spoke up, who took up space, who paved the way so that she could work and explore and create, and so continue to hold the door open for those who come after.

Ask me, and I can’t define jazz, but I can talk about beat poetry and Gregory Corso and Frank O’Hara and Amiri Baraka and Diane di Prima and Frank London Brown. I stand on their shoulders, gazing out wards, listening, taking it all in. The beat of the band, the beat of the street, the beat of the night train and the pinball machines, the warm breeze that comes across the sea, the laughter and the sound of traffic running through my body. The work and the joy. The sound of a music that refuses to be defined. As the poet Ted Joans put it: Hallelujah I dig JAZZ so Yeah JAZZ IS MY RELIGION.

Note: Røter was originally commissioned by Bergen Big Band and premiered at the Bergen International Festival in 2022. The work includes text and recitation by Frode Grytten and video art by Anne Marthe Dyvi.