Ralph Peterson 35th Annual Student Music Awards - Downbeat

Kresten osgood
The Energy of the Situation
Performing deep in the twilight hours of last
year’s Copenhagen Jazz Festival, at the
city’s rebel enclave of Freetown Christiania,
drummer/composer Kresten Osgood led a
rowdy crowd of drug abusers and aging hippies
through a torrid drum solo. But he wasn’t playing
it. Germany’s Günter Baby Sommer bashed
the skins while Osgood gleefully agitated the
crowd, one minute ripping the electric bass,
the next approximating a Zoot Sims saxophone
solo, the next beating the floor with mallets
and metal drumsticks. Through a cloudy haze
of (legal) herbal smoke, Osgood and Sommer
worked the room like it was the veritable gateway
to hell. But this was a typical performance
for the 35-year-old Danish musician.
“My approach developed when I was a
teenager,” Osgood recalls. “Me and my cousin,
who was a piano player, were isolated on
the west coast of Denmark. So we developed
a post-Dada way of improvising that was completely
our own. When we came to the city,
we found no one was even close to this type
of expression. We were limited in certain playing
skills, but we were very abstract. We could
play something that sounded like Wynton
Marsalis in 1992, but when we ran out of ability,
we would go into avant-garde theater. We’d
run around the room or throw things at the
audience.”
One of the most prolific musicians in
Denmark, Osgood’s lengthy discography
includes such diverse recordings as Violet
Violets (with bassist Ben Street and the late
reedist Sam Rivers), Florida (a duo recording
with pianist Paul Bley), Tattoos And
Mushrooms (with trumpeter Steven Bernstein
and tuba player Marcus Rojas) and Hammond
Rens, an ongoing project with organist Dr.
Lonnie Smith that reinvents the organ trio as a
time-traveling vehicle hitting Mach 5.0.
Osgood never lets ego, or his own personality,
obscure the music. Even if it’s working, be
sure to break it—that seems to be his motto.
“Sometimes in my groups, we compose
music that is too hard for us to play,” Osgood
laughs. “But we always go for the spirituality
or the energy of the situation more than playing
it right. When playing with my friends in
New York, they usually try to show that they
know what they’re doing—to keep the gig or
to impress the bandleader. That mentality, we
don’t have so much in Denmark. We don’t have
to survive the same way; we’re not depending on
a good reputation to sustain us.” —Ken Micallef