Frode Haltli, Tora Augestad, and Trygve Seim

I've been covering a lot of jazz recently, all over town. Last week we had the Nights of Eastern-Western Fusion concert series, hosted by the Norwegian Embassy. I got to see saxophonist Trygve Seim, cabaret vocalist Tora Augestad, and accordionist Frode Haltli at a place called El Sawy Culture Wheel just around the corner from my house. You can read my writeup below. I spoke with the three of them after the show—which was wonderful, by the way—and found out that Trygve Seim's wife is Asne Sierestad, the author of The Bookseller of Kabul. She's exactly where I want to be in ten years, having written several booklength documentary works and a slew of magazine pieces and news stories. Maybe I won't be content with success though, because I don't think I'll settle until I get to be Barack Obama's press secretary during his second term.

Aim high.

A melancholic northern breeze

By Elliott D. Woods
First Published: November 5, 2008

Norwegian saxophonist Trygve Seim and vocalist Tora Augestad at the Culture Wheel on Sunday, Nov. 2. Norwegian accordionist Frote Haltli.

Nights of Eastern-Western Fusion, a concert series organized by the Norwegian Embassy in Egypt, brought saxophonist Trygve Seim, accordionist Frode Haltli, and vocalist Tora Augestad together at El Sawy Culture Wheel on Sunday night, where they opened with a traditional Norwegian “welcome song.”

It was a welcome to a melancholic tonal landscape where foghorns hung in the damp air above the fjords with the weight of memory, calling the lonely and longing out into the mist.

In the Norwegian folk tradition, “Even songs that describe summer and spring are melancholic,” explained Augestad. Raspy, drunken notes from Seim’s battered Conn saxophones suffused Wisdom Hall with a palpable sense of nostalgia, deepened by the accordion’s atonal chorus and Augestad’s siren song. Dwelling on the aching solitude, the trio brought dreamlike continuity to a repertoire of traditional and modern arrangements stretching as far away in time and place as medieval Iran, where Ibsen-inspired ennui comes into perfect harmony with the poet Jalaluddin Rumi’s lyrical meditations.

Frode Haltli and Tora Augestad tour regularly with Trygve Seim’s eponymous ensemble, but Sunday night’s performance was the first time the three have performed as a trio. Their backgrounds are diverse: Seim, 37, studied modern jazz and composition at the Trondheim Conservatory.

Seim has developed strong ties with Egyptian jazz great Fathy Salama since 2005, when the two met after Seim’s concert at Nile Hilton. Seim and Salama have hosted each other numerous times in their respective countries.

Seim’s Egypt connection also extends to Dr Alfred Gamil, leader of Qithara, with whom he is currently studying Arabic music.

There is a tension between the accordion’s antique sound and the improvisational technique at the core of Haltli’s style, a tension that mounts as Haltli weaves a complex lattice of foreboding, sustained bass notes and flitting high notes around Seim’s somber sax melodies. One doesn’t normally think of the accordion as a conduit to the blue and brazen world of jazz, but the exchange between Haltli and Seim is nothing short of profound — the reward of seven years of collaboration. Their first joint album “Yeraz” came out this year to high acclaim.

Sunday’s songs circled around themes of juxtaposition and irony: the child who “dreams of growing up,” only to realize as an adult that “all of the beauty was when he was a child;” the warmth and beauty of the sunrise quelled by the chill of its descent; peace finally attained just moments before death. Referring to a traditional welcome song, Augestad said, “It doesn’t sound like one, because it’s very dark, and I think that’s because it’s often very dark in Norway.”

Though a certain blue pall enshrouded the majority of songs, Augestad’s soaring voice offered brief glimpses of light through Seim’s and Haltli’s clouded, subdued phrases.

“I try to color the phrases,” she said, “because it’s important to be able to tell the audience what the music is about,” especially when the language barrier makes lyrics incomprehensible.

Augestad has a soft spot for traditional Norwegian music. “I don’t sing them as traditional folk tunes,” said Augestad; instead, she adapts them to whatever emotional and physical context she finds herself in. “There’s so much freedom when you play songs like these,” she added.

The trio profits from the work of legendary composer Johan Kvandal, who transcribed many songs from Norway’s folk tradition over the course of his prolific career. Before Kvandal, Norwegian folk songs were passed from generation to generation aurally, keeping them local and preventing them from entering the broader world of music theory and composition. Thanks to Kvandal’s generation, Norway’s folk tradition is gaining international attention.

Sunday’s concert demonstrated the ease with which Norwegian folk songs lend themselves to contemporary adaptation. Skevs — short improvised songs — blend perfectly with the improvisational technique prized by musicians like Seim, Haltli, and Augestad. The Norwegian folk tradition heavily relies on minor scales, or modal scales, which generate a haunting tonal aura, perfectly in-line with Seim’s style of jazz composition, based on improvisation, space and eerie transitions.

“We do traditional songs in a way that we normally play,” said Seim. “We don’t do it exactly the same every time,” he added. “We put some Arabic in it tonight.”

Under Seim’s leadership, the trio charts a course through a world of binary opposition. Light and airy melodies are always undermined by the slightly dissonant whine of the accordion, or the throaty rumble of the tenor sax.

“This music is very honest,” said Augestad, referring to the constant wrestling of competing themes — love and loss, hope and despair, happiness and sadness, youth and age, masculinity and femininity.

While melancholic, the trio’s music is never melodramatic. The only certainty on offer is the undeniable truth that life is predicated on paradox, and that we spend the majority of our time on Earth in a futile, sometimes laughable struggle to comprehend the incomprehensible.

In their final number, the trio turned back to Jalaluddin Rumi’s poem, “On the Day I Die,” with lyrics translated by Coleman Barks and music by Trygve Seim. A cool air of calm spread across the theater, tensions finally resolved with a promise: “Death has nothing to do with going away/ The sun sets and the moon sets but they are not gone/ Death is a coming together.” But we’ll never be content to believe it.

Catch Frode Haltli, Tora Augestad and Trygve Seim tonight, 7 pm, at El Geneina Theater. Tel: (02) 2362 5057.