Ron Carter Esperanza Spalding - Downbeat

Stian Westerhus
Nonlinear Approach
Norwegian guitarist Stian Westerhus experienced
a severe crisis in confidence while
earning his master’s degree from the prestigious
Trondheim Conservatory in the early aughts.
Technically gifted musicians with extensive jazz
training surrounded him, dwarfing his ability to
improvise on familiar forms. “This feeling of
not being good enough went on for months,” he
said this past summer, during an interview conducted
during a brief respite from activity at the
Kongsberg Jazz Festival in Norway. The situation
is much different now, and Westerhus is
turning heads all over the globe, but it took some
soul-searching to get where he is now.
“One day I was sitting outside the school,
smoking a cigarette, and being really pissed off
with myself and being depressed, and then it hit
me that all I had to do was to play—just play
and see what comes out of it,” he recalled. “You
have to do what you feel is best, and you can’t
do anything better than that.” That realization set
Westerhus upon the dramatic creative path he’s
followed over the last decade to become one of
improvised music’s most exciting and dynamic
figures: a vibrantly original electric guitarist with
a hybrid improvisational style that owes little to
jazz’s sonic identity, but nearly everything to its
heightened sense of engagement and interplay.
He’s a key member of the trio led by
Norwegian trumpeter Nils Petter Molvaer—
radically reshaping the horn man’s group sound
both as a player and producer of the recent
Baboon Moon (Thirsty Ear)—but it’s with a
series of visceral solo albums that he has largely
developed and defined his sound. His first solo
album, 2009’s Galore (Rune Grammofon/Last
Record Company), was recorded while he was
still in school and established his modus operandi:
Westerhus sequesters himself in the studio
and trusts his instincts, improvising instinctually
and recording the results. He grew up listening
to progressive rock and heavy metal, and he’s
let those influences seep into his work—whether
directly, in his rhythmically ferocious, riffdriven
duo Monolithic with drummer Kenneth
Kapstad (of Motorpsycho), or on his monumental
solo record Pitch Black Star Spangled (Rune
Grammofon), where acidic atmospheres collide
with industrial-sized, distended riffs.
Westerhus said he has sometimes been
embarrassed by the raw material his solo sessions
generate because he didn’t see it coming,
and that’s certainly true of his recently released
powerful third album The Matriarch And The
Wrong Kind Of Flowers (Rune Grammofon),
most of which he recorded in the intensely reverberant
Emanuel Vigeland Mausoleum using
andré løyning
acoustic guitars and bows. Rigorous overdubs
and post-production followed. Compared to his
previous work, the sounds are much more meditative
and subdued—if riddled by a delicious tension
–and marked by his richest color palette and
range of texture yet; when he unleashes a flash of
sonic violence, it hits harder than ever.
Perhaps the fullest expression of the guitarist’s
talents emerges in his whiplash improvising
duo with the veteran Norwegian singer Sidsel
Endresen. In recent years she’s developed a boldly
abstract improvisational style, and its choppy,
rhythmically unpredictable qualities find a perfect
fit with the work of Westerhus, who manipulates
his playing with a veritable arsenal of
effects pedals. “From the first time I heard him,
I was astounded by his uncontrived and totally
natural sense of timing, the clarity and depth of
his ideas, his nonlinear approach to interplay, his
enormous ears, and the space he gives and also
readily takes,” said Endresen. The duo’s debut
album Didymoi Dreams (Rune Grammofon)
is a marvel of give-and-take and push-and-pull,
from pin-drop intimacy to cobweb-clearing
caterwauls.
“We have a very similar way of thinking
about music and the improvisational aspect
of just letting it flow and not filtering it,” said
Westerhus of the partnership. “We will both follow
but also go in opposite directions. It’s OK to
play a groove or a major chord. There’s no real
boundaries, and that almost has to be a necessity
in the people I play with.” —Peter Margasak