KARL SEGLEM

Karl Seglem is an institution in the Norwegian music community. Since 1988 he has released 27 albums both as a solo artist and fronting his own groups. Seglem has forged his own unique idiom as a tenor saxophonist, goat horn player and composer. Rhythm, movement, drive and serenity are key words that could describe the kind of music Karl Seglem creates. He´s still pursuing his long-term project: combining the Norwegian folk music idiom with improvisation and with elements of other musical traditions and genres. Presenting world and jazz music with Norwegian roots. This is truly genre-bending music in the best sense of the word: the clamour of the goat horns, electronic flights of fancy in exquisite sheets of sound, echoes of rural folk music from the home of the Hardanger fiddle, and compelling urban improvisation.

His albums "Ossicles", “Femstein" and "Urbs” attracted a great deal of attention in the Norwegian and International press (Two of them nominated to the Norwegian "Grammy" Spellemannprisen). Seglem has been called one of Norway’s foremost tenor saxophonists, with an original and distinctive voice and a unique ability to renew himself. Born and raised in the county of Sogn og Fjordane in Årdalstangen, the heart of Norway’s fjordland.

His collaboration with fiddler Håkon Høgemo, a leading traditional player of Hardanger fiddle (the distinctive fiddle traditional in some regions of Norway, with a shorter neck than a standard fiddle and bearing an additional four or more sympathetic strings that resonate to enhance the music’s ringing drones), has been going on for over twenty years now.

The music that Seglem has developed over the years is, like the Norwegian traditional music that inspired much of it, a creature of melodic line and rhythm rather than the vertical structures of harmony and chords that prevail in the western classical tradition and much other present-day western music. It reconnects with the older layers of European music, and indeed starts to show some affinities with Arabic music, which is similarly non-chordal.

Its textures are of air, stone, wood and bone, not the night-time, finger-snapping urban images of much American jazz. Seglem is still a tenor saxist, but his playing has the husky, vocal sound of traditional pastoral instruments, and indeed he also uses two of those, the bukkehorn, goat-horns; one a trumpet-horn and one sounded by a tied-on reed. Having found his native musical language, he speaks it fluently; the themes he uses often sound like traditional melodies, and indeed they sometimes are, but on is latest albums they’re all his own compositions.

There have been composers who have claimed their music is a free spirit, purged of any influence of the past. It's never true, of course; we all carry around with us a personal tradition made up of all we've ever heard, and it's often the musicians who accept and understand this the most deeply who make the most distinctive and communicative music. So it is with Karl Seglem and the music on his CDs.