Players - Downbeat

ARVE HENRIKSEN FINDS NEW SOUNDS
WITH A DISTINCTLY EUROPEAN APPROACH
Norwegian MAP
By Peter Margasak
As Norwegian trumpeter Arve Henriksen recalled how his listening habits expanded, growing from American jazz,
contemporary classical and international music—with endless stops in between—it became clear that no one
style or approach managed to dominate his thinking. If his musicality has reflected a sponge-like absorption for
all kinds of sounds, the actual sound of his music is anything but diffuse. Few trumpeters over the last two
decades have developed such an instantly recognizable sonic personality.
“I was always searching for my own sound, a
hook to find the right way of producing and creating
my own sound,” said Henriksen, 40.
That hook turned out to be the shakuhachi,
the ancient Japanese bamboo flute. While studying
at the Trondheim Conservatory two decades
ago, fellow Norwegian trumpeter Nils Petter
Molvaer introduced him to shakuhachi music.
Henriksen instantly recognized it as the portal to
develop the sound he’d been searching for. “I
copied loads of shakuhachi techniques and gradually
worked with them,” he said. “It took five
or six years before it produced some real results,
but hearing that instrument was important,
because finally I had some sort of personal idea
about making my sound.”
His debut solo recording, Sakuteiki (Rune
Grammofon, 2001), focused on those qualities
to the point where it could be difficult to figure
out that he was playing a trumpet—despite the
fact that the music was recorded live to twotrack
without any effects, even in postproduction.
But Henriksen’s sound had already been
turning up on a growing number of contexts: in
the dark free-improvisation of Supersilent, the
atmospheric post-bop of Food, and as a member
of groups led by saxophonist Trygve Seim and
pianists Christian Wallumrød and Jon Balke.
Cartography, his fourth solo album, and first
for ECM, scrambles any clear lineage from the
styles and approaches he absorbed when he was
younger. If anything, it sounds like ethereal
40 DOWNBEAT April 2009
ambient music created with a painterly touch
and marked by a refined melodic sensibility.
Although it draws heavily from jazz in its
emphasis on improvisation and some of its rich
sonic vocabulary, it’s not jazz.
“It is a picture of where I stand today, and it’s
a map of where I can put my music,” he said.
“The music comes from many places and I’m
just borrowing it for a while and then it goes on
with someone else.”
Where Henriksen stands today is a long way
from where he first set foot as a member of
Veslefrekk—with drummer Jarle Vespestad and
keyboardist Ståle Storløkken—back in 1988
while at Trondheim. This trio, which modeled
itself after the Norwegian group Jøkleba—with
keyboardist Balke, drummer Audun Kleive and
trumpeter Per Jørgensen—let the three young
musicians explore a deep slate of interests.
Henriksen got his start playing marchingband
music in his small home village of Stryn as
a child. Before long he fell for American jazz,
from traditional styles through post-bop, but he
never stopped checking out new sounds.
“By the time I had come to Trondheim I felt
more attached to the spacey way of creating
ECM music,” he said. “The standard jazz repertoire
had become so strict, it’s more of a reproduction
of something that happened a long time
ago. It’s more important to create something that
I feel attached to. I’m a Norwegian, I’m a
European, and I have a closer connection to
Norwegian folk music than American Negro
spirituals or the standard jazz repertoire.”
While Henriksen expresses gratitude for the
years he spent hearing and absorbing the lessons
of American jazz and for the fundamental technique
it provided, today he doesn’t consider it
the most honest avenue for his artistic expression.
At school he was free to find his own way;
he only had two classmates in the jazz program
when he started in 1987.
As heard on Veslefrekk’s eponymous 1994
debut album, the trumpeter’s distinctive sound
had already emerged. After Miles Davis, his first
great trumpet heroes were Chet Baker and
Denmark’s Palle Mikkelborg. Beginning with
his teenage years, Henriksen sought to forge his
own soft, airy and mellow variation of his style.
Subsequent encounters with the music of
Molvaer and American trumpeter Jon Hassell
expanded his view of the horn, and over the
years he incorporated more ideas.
In 1997, Veslefrekk was invited to perform
for a one-off collaboration with producer and
sound artist Helge Sten at a jazz festival in
Bergen, Norway. The performance was so satisfying
that he became a new member of the
group. Veslefrekk became Supersilent. “It was a
big chance for us,” Henriksen said. “He brought
in this darker, heavier frightening thing.”
Indeed, from the beginning, Supersilent took
the electronic sound of ’70s Davis into new terrain,
freely mixing in synthetic sounds with tur-