Hedvig!
Norway's most exciting guitarist expands her range, again
I’ve been a fan of Norwegian guitarist Hedvig Mollestad for more than a decade. A graduate of the Norwegian Academy of Music who was named Young Jazz Talent of the Year at 27, her music has more in common with 1970s hard rock players like Ted Nugent, Robin Trower and Tony Iommi than countrymen like Eivind Aarset or Terje Rypdal. Since 2011, she, bassist Ellen Brekken and drummer Ivar Loe Bjørnstad have released six studio albums and one double live LP, all on Rune Grammofon, that scorch the air with instrumental riff-fests more inclined to inspire headbanging and horn-throwing than the polite nods of appreciation that typically greet modern jazz.
The trio’s 2011 debut Shoot! made a statement from the instant the sidelong, hard-punching riff to “Gun and the E-Kid” launched, and while it had its mellow moments — “Doom’s Lair” recalled the Ginger Baker Trio with Bill Frisell and Charlie Haden — it also included a cover of the Melvins’ “Blood Witch” featuring almost primeval, howling male-female vocals. The 2013 follow-up, All of Them Witches, was even heavier, with Mollestad’s chugging, primitivist riffs swathed in feedback and noise, not unlike Neil Young’s 1990s work with Crazy Horse. Behind her, Brekken and Bjørnstad set up throbbing, tribal rhythms that were half Black Sabbath, half Caspar Brötzmann Massaker. The following year, album number three appeared. The six tracks on Enfant Terrible were crisper than those on Witches but just as heavy. Brekken in particular came into her own, rumbling like an idling bulldozer on slow-burning numbers like “Arigato, Bitch” and “Liquid Bridges.”
I saw the trio at the tiny Manhattan club Nublu in March 2014, in between Witches and Enfant; it wasn’t so much a “tour date” as an extra show before leaving the country — they’d come over to play South by Southwest. Their visual presentation — Mollestad and Brekken in cocktail dresses (the former’s covered in red sequins), Bjørnstad in a crisp white shirt and red tie — diverged sharply from the throbbing hard rock they dished out to a small but rapt audience. A few years later, in 2018, I found myself in their homeland when Rune Grammofon celebrated its 20th anniversary with a two-day festival that included performances by the trio, Fire!, Maja S.K. Ratkje, and Supersilent, and I was one of the journalists flown to Oslo to cover it. (I wrote about it for DownBeat.) In addition to the nighttime performance, the trio did a mid-afternoon set at a local record store to promote their then brand-new album, Smells Funny, and it was great to watch a group of little kids rock out up front.
Black Stabat Mater, their shortest studio release to date, with only five tracks — two of which blend seamlessly together into an opening 14-minute monster jam — in a little over 33 minutes, was released in 2016, simultaneously with the aforementioned double live LP Evil in Oslo (you have to buy the vinyl to get the CD, which is simply slipped into the sleeve). BSM balanced their visceral and pummelling side with the beauty that was always hidden at the center of the music. The massive two-part album opener “Approaching/On Arrival” featured some of Thomassen’s fiercest, most psychedelic shredding on record, and thick, driving drums from Bjørnstad.
For its first seven minutes, it was a top-down, desert highway rock anthem that took Jimi Hendrix’s “Freedom” and the first Montrose album as starting points, then heads into space. But the “On Arrival” section was exactly the opposite, at least at first — the sound of entropy, Thomassen’s guitar and Brekken’s bass striking massive but disconnected chords and interjecting bursts of ear-sanding noise, as Bjørnstad assaulted his kit with machine-gun fills and cymbal crashes like storm waves striking a beach. It was like a cross between Neil Young’s 1991 noise collage “Arc” and the Stooges’ “LA Blues.” In its final few minutes, structure gradually reasserted itself as the rhythm section sped up, charged through the wall, and vanished over the horizon.
The three remaining pieces, “In the Court of the Trolls,” “40” and “Somebody Else Should Be On That Bus” displayed other, equally new facets of the group’s sound, particularly “40,” which added acoustic guitar and bowed bass for the first time in their history. Thomassen’s and her bandmates’ continued evolution as composers, players, and improvisers was thrilling to hear.
It was just as evident on Evil in Oslo, recorded at two November 2015 club gigs and divided into four side-long medleys of pieces from their first three albums. The trio’s fluid, organic interaction, built over nearly a decade of playing together, was on full display.
Thomassen is clearly the leader onstage, conducting the ensemble with a step forward or back, or a swing of her massive Gibson ES-335’s neck, but Brekken and Bjørnstad are always locked in, speeding up or slowing down in telepathic synchrony. On the live recordings, every piece retained its core riff, but also grew into something entirely new through raucous improvisation. The first three sides, recorded in a large theatre, had a spaciousness the studio albums didn’t always possess, mixed as they were for maximum crunch. The fourth, though, was recorded in a cramped bar, and the sound was a dense roar, almost recalling Hawkwind’s Space Ritual in the way Brekken’s bass dominated as Thomassen floated toward the ceiling, only descending to hammer home one more massive biker-metal riff.
The two most recent HM3 discs, 2018’s Smells Funny and 2021’s Ding Dong. You’re Dead., were as good as everything that had come before, but the band has a style, so it’s like comparing one Motörhead album to another. They’re never going to slip beneath a certain level of quality, but they’re also not going to surprise you (much).
In search of new horizons, Mollestad has begun releasing solo albums, each of which (there have been four so far) is totally different from the others and all of which are both fascinating and thrilling. Her solo debut, 2020’s Ekhidna, was commissioned by the Vossa Jazz Festival in Norway, and was written for and recorded by a group featuring two keyboardists, Marte Eberson and Erlend Slettevoll, drummer Torstein Lofthus (of Elephant9) and percussionist Ole Mofjell, and trumpeter Susana Santos Silva. The music was heavy on synths, with Mollestad and Silva sharing the front line in a very interesting manner. On tracks like “A Stone’s Throw,” they were in hardcore ’70s fusion mode, cranking out scorching riffs and high-flying trumpet solos.
The follow-up, Tempest Revisited, was a nod to Norwegian composer Arne Nordheim, whose best-known piece is 1979’s The Tempest, a ballet based on the Shakespeare play that blends classical and electronic instrumentation. The band that time included Marte Eberson on keyboards; Ivar Joe Bjørnstad from her Trio on drums; Trond Frønes on bass; and Martin Myhre Olsen, Karl Nyberg, and Peter Erik Vergeni on saxophones. The album featured more heavy, rockin’ fusion in an early ’70s style, as well as a long, quiet, atmospheric piece, and it all concluded with “High Hair,” built around a blues riff as tall as a barn and bolstered by marching-elephant drums and a wall of saxes straight from an early King Crimson record.
Her 2022 release Maternity Beat, a suite of pieces performed with the 12-member Trondheim Jazz Orchestra, might be her greatest work to date. It’s certainly her most widescreen and ambitious. It’s a little bit jazz fusion, a little bit high-level prog, a little bit Laurie Anderson (there are multiple female voices reciting enigmatic phrases in hypnotized cadences), and when Mollestad starts tearing it up on guitar, the air seems to crackle. Other than a version of “All Flights Cancelled” from Ding Dong. You’re Dead, the music is entirely new, and really reveals her strength as a composer and arranger. The title piece is an incredibly gentle duet for clean guitar and keyboard until its final four minutes, when horns, flute and drums come in to give it a kind of pastoral folk-prog feeling, gleaming like sunlight on wet grass in the morning. It’s one of the most purely beautiful pieces of music she’s ever released.
Mollestad’s most recent release, a self-titled album with the new band Weejuns, marks another change of direction. Weejuns is a trio featuring keyboardist Ståle Storløkken of Supersilent and Elephant9, and drummer Ole Mofjell, who played on Ekhidna. Their debut release is an 80-minute double LP, recorded live at the Munch Museum in Oslo, the club Blå (also in Oslo), and Spor5 in Stavanger.
Given that instrumental palette, and her own history, it would be easy to expect something in the vein of Tony Williams Lifetime — a crash ’n’ blast power trio with overdriven organ, apocalypse drums, and thick, gritty guitar riffs flying in every direction like radioactive shrapnel. But while there’s a certain amount of that going on, these are long jams, not hard rock anthems. Of the six tracks on the CD, four run between 12 and 22 minutes, and the atmospheric qualities of Storløkken’s work with Supersilent are embraced just as strongly as Mollestad’s doom-fusion leanings. Mofjell is a busy drummer, but one who serves as an excellent fulcrum, balancing the other two and keeping the music suspended in air. On the longest piece, “I’ll Give You Twenty-One,” the keyboards sound like a vintage Mellotron and the guitar emits long scraping drones; it sounds like a particularly atmospheric passage of live Yes from 1972 or so.
While it’s possible to argue that you don’t need every Hedvig Mollestad Trio album — forced to pick just two, I’d go with Shoot! and Black Stabat Mater, but the live disc is killer — the truth is, she’s yet to make a bad record. Each of her solo discs has been a one-off, with the first three composed and created for unique occasions, but I’d definitely like to hear more music from Weejuns. And now that all of this music is readily available via Rune Grammofon’s new Bandcamp page, you’ve got no excuse not to dive in.
Before I go: two new albums from Burning Ambulance Music are coming very soon! Ivo Perelman and Nate Wooley’s Polarity 2 was just reviewed by AllAboutJazz; Mark Corroto says, “Unlike most saxophone and trumpet encounters, the sound is a collaboration instead of competition. The music here is instantly composed, and ‘music’ might not be the best descriptor. This is dialogue. It is also dance, a congenial chess match, or a quilt sewn by two sets of hands.” Pre-order your copy now! (If you’ve never heard Polarity, from 2021, there’s a bundle available — you can get both CDs for $25 plus shipping.)
My latest Stereogum column came out last week; I interviewed pianist Aaron Diehl, who’s just released an orchestral recording of Mary Lou Williams’ Zodiac Suite, using her own arrangements, and reviewed new albums by Matana Roberts, James Brandon Lewis, Darius Jones, Darcy James Argue’s Secret Society, and more. Check it out.
I also reviewed a bunch of Latin rock albums for Shfl, including titles by Santana, the Mars Volta, Malo, Julieta Venegas, Natalia Lafourcade, Café Tacuba, and more. Part 1 is here, Part 2 is here.
That’s it for now. See you next week!
Thanks so much for introducing me to this trio! Listening to their music right now 👍