The Norwegian Wind Ensemble, conducted by Maria Schneider, played Porgy & Bess, followed by Sketches of Spain, to a capacity audience.

Solo trumpeter Nicholas Payton used Porgy & Bess to present a laid-back opening set with a smooth and beautiful tone, if somewhat lacking in fire and commitment.

The Opera House, Oslo

But after the interval the band were fronted by the young Norwegian trumpeter Arve Hendriksen, who more than made up for the soporific effects of the early evening, bringing the audience to their feet with his muted and haunting probing of the ghost of Miles Davis.

And, great as this performance was, I was most impressed by the band and the setting and the rapt attention of a knowledgeable and expectant audience.

In 1958, (Dave) Brubeck visited 12 countries, including Poland, Turkey, East and West Pakistan, Afghanistan, India, Iran and Iraq. As Brubeck explained it, “We were out 120 days without a day off, and it was rough travel. The water wasn’t fit to drink, but you got so thirsty, you drank it. The State Department didn’t want us to come home. They wanted us to stay out. They cancelled our concerts here at home.”

In an interview with National Endowment for the Arts chair Dana Gioia several years ago, Brubeck told how the Voice of America had been his warm-up band: “Most of the people, when they spoke to you in English, sounded like Willis Conover from the Voice of America. His show came on every night worldwide. . . To this day . . . you can hear his voice. In Russia, people sound like Willis. If you listened to my recordings in the Soviet Union during the darkest days of the Cold War, you could be sent to Siberia or worse. They listened to my records, and they called it ‘Jazz in Bones.’ Using X-ray plates, they could record Willis Conover and get a fairly good recording. If you were caught with that, you were dead. But the doctors and the nurses and the students would very carefully listen to these recordings, and they had underground jazz meetings all the time.”

Miranda Sykes was confident on the back of her new CD, Bliss, and gave us great late-night vocals, accompanying herself on double bass.

She doesn’t have a soaring voice, but the way she uses it is intriguing, exploring traditional jazz and cabaret forms and allowing a subtle mastery of tones to dictate the pace and timing of her songs.

I would have been happy to see and hear more from her.

Phil Beer seems able to play anything with strings and the backdrop of instruments lining the stage barely leaves room for him when he is finally introduced. He opens the gig with the JJ Cale song, Cocaine, and then goes on to explain that it was the song he first played in public at the age of 12 at his local parent/teachers meeting . . . He’s an accomplished musician, but also a very funny man.

He tells a joke about a young recruit in the first world war who can take no more gassing and brutality and watching his mates die one after the other. The lad throws down his weapon, turns his back on the enemy and runs. He doesn’t look back, but runs on, through his exhaustion until, eventually, the sounds of battle no longer even a distant hum, he falls to the ground and sleeps.

When he wakes he sees, in front on him on the earth, a pair of highly polished officers boots, and he hears a voice coming from above. ‘What are you doing here?’

‘Oh, I’m sorry, major,’ says the lad. ‘I couldn’t take any more. I watched my friends being shot, I saw them being gassed, it was carnage, it was terrible, I just ran and ran. I’m sorry, major, I’m really sorry.’

‘I’m not a major,’ says the voice. ‘I’m a general.’

”Oh, my God,’ says the young deserter. ‘I didn’t think I’d run that far.’

Beer runs through an idiosyncratic list of songs, following Cocaine with a couple of Irish ballads, George Harrison’s Here comes the Sun on a Ukulele, Tom Lehrer’s I Hold Your Hand in Mine, and a first-world-war-medley.

Later, with Miranda Sykes accompanying on vocals and double bass, he gave us heart-stopping renditions of The Hollies’ Bus Stop and Paul Simon’s Still Crazy.

So, all in all, then, a night to remember.

The evening began with a group of young musicians from Helsinki, the Ilmiliekki Quartet, comprising trumpet, piano, bass and drums. Decidedly modern with a lot of jazz influences, but not disregarding other avant garde input from the likes of Björk and Radiohead. Original tunes from members of the band held a packed audience in a rapt silence. They finished their set with Ornette Coleman’s What Reason Could I Give played on the trumpet by Verneri Pohjola. He stuck the horn into the open Sony Grand and played softly with the harmonics.The Ilmiliekki Quartet must be one of Europe’s most exciting young quartets. We can’t wait for them to come back again.

The second half of the evening was with Solveig Slettahjell on vocals and piano and Sjur Miljeteig on trumpet. This Norwegian duo were much smoother and commercial than the Finns. Solveig Slettahjell has a pleasing voice and was brimming with an eclectic mix of influences from Janis Joplin to Eartha Kitt with a good dollop of gospel and country music thrown into the pot.

Solveig Slettahjell is one of Norway’s most celebrated jazz singers. Probably deservedly so, but part of me was still engaged with the first set of the evening, and it would have taken something a little more gutsy to drag me away.

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Lore Sjöberg shares some interesting thoughts about blogging:

Creating your own blog is about as easy as creating your own urine, and you’re about as likely to find someone else interested in it.

“Blog” itself is short for “weblog,” which is short for “we blog because we weren’t very popular in high school and we’re trying to gain respect and admiration without actually having to be around people.”

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We caught Billy Jenkins and Songs of Praise, his six piece band, at The Shed, Hovingham, North Yorkshire. There are other gigs scheduled at different locations, so if it comes your way don’t miss it.

Billy Jenkins sings and shouts and jumps around, lies on the floor and stands on tables and plays guitar, supported by an incredible cast of musicians. You’ll never be able to listen to Wonderful World or Everybody’s Talkin’ again without thinking of Billy. Frenetic, avant-garde, jazz and blues like you only dreamed it.

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Orhan Pamuk was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature 2006. There is an interview with him on the Nobel Site. And an even more revealing first-hand account, by James Marcus, of Pamuk’s Arthur Miller Freedom to Write Lecture.

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General Sir Richard Dannatt, the head of the British Army, said British troops should get out of Iraq “sometime soon because our presence exacerbates the security problems”.

Gen Dannatt, who became Chief of the General Staff in August, told a newspaper:

“We are in a Muslim country and Muslims’ views of foreigners in their country are quite clear.
“As a foreigner, you can be welcomed by being invited in a country, but we weren’t invited certainly by those in Iraq at the time.
“The military campaign we fought in 2003 effectively kicked the door in.
“Whatever consent we may have had in the first place, may have turned to tolerance and has largely turned to intolerance.”

And what a night it was. The regular Tango Siempre people were on top form. Smooth and committed playing from Ros Stephen and dynamic and punchy piano from Jonathan Taylor. But with the addition of their guests they took us on an exploration of the boundaries of the form, fusing traditional and nuevo tango styles with jazz improvisation and new music written for and by members of the band.

The addition of virtuoso jazz saxophonist Gilad Atzmon (winner of the BBC Jazz Award) turned a good musical experience into a great one.

Looking like a merge between Robert de Niro and Denis Hopper, with a profound case of myopia thrown into the mix, Gilad Atzmon wasn’t happy with the sound system. Nevertheless, or perhaps because of his dissatisfaction, he played his instruments with passionate abstraction.

He made everything new; his tones twisting and turning the ever-malleable form of tango into vignettes from the middle-east, only to push them immediately into different shapes, European folk, British punk or a maze of American jazz horns from the forties or fifties, conjuring up a dizzyingly cross-cultural mix.

He gave us passion, drama, sentimentality and from time to time an unexpected and melancholy beauty that left his audience stunned and shaking their heads in wonderment.

Atzmon was born in Israel and raised as a secular Jew. He served his compulsory military service at the time of the Lebanon war (1982), an event that prompted his scepticism about Zionism and Israeli politics. Ten years later he fled his native country with a no-return ticket. In the UK he studied Philosophy but after graduation chose a musical rather than an academic career. He was a member of The Blockheads and toured with them and Ian Dury during the last months of Dury’s life. He now lives in London and considers himself an exile.

I always mention that giving interviews saves me from spending money on shrinks. I think that the need to re-invent oneself is not necessarily an escape. It is rather a search for the real essence. In fact, the process of re-invention draws its power from a clear assault on the ego. You start to play when you stop thinking. Using Lacanian terminology you may say: “You are where you do not think”. It may sound funny, but I do realise now that it is my love for jazz that made me more and more critical of Jewish identity and Zionism. At the age of eighteen, when I was supposed to become a supremacist Judeo-soldier, I fell in love with Coltrane and Bird. It was then when I realised that the culture that inspires me (Afro-American) had nothing to do with the culture I was supposed to be fighting for.

Mossad’s motto, he remembers, is: “By way of deception, thou shalt do war.”

As funny as it may sound, when I was twenty-six I received a formal letter from the Israeli ‘prime minister’s office’ inviting me to join the Israeli secret service (basically the Mossad). I hope that you realise that I didn’t go for that tempting career shift. I do not have any doubt that they knew exactly who I am, what I do and how to exploit the beauty of music.