Norwegian Atomic fuses disparate components

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      If any theme is emerging during this, the 20th anniversary of the Vancouver International Jazz Festival, it's that jazz is an art form that can embrace just about any music imaginable. On this year's program are bands that have made jazz from vintage Finnish pop music and from Nirvana's 1991 hit "Smells Like Teen Spirit", bands that embrace African drumming and Japanese shakuhachi, bands that seek inspiration in the New Orleans past, and bands that find it in the electronic future.

      Jazz is constantly embracing and engulfing other styles, and the Norwegian quintet Atomic is a good example of how that process works. Superficially, the group seems most indebted to the jazz avant-garde of 40 years ago; Miles Davis's mid-'60s quintet and Keith Jarrett's Impulse recordings provide possible templates for its fiery yet cerebral approach. Examine the credits to Atomic's Boom Boom CD, however, and it becomes obvious that the group looks beyond jazz for its source material: included are arrangements of works by early-20th-century composer Paul Hindemith ("Praeludium") and turn-of-the-21st rock band Radiohead ("Pyramid Song").

      Somehow both sound exactly like jazz-and exactly like Atomic. But neither will be on the band's set list when it plays the Vancouver East Cultural Centre on Saturday (June 25) and the Centre in Vancouver for Performing Arts on Sunday (June 26). In the three years since Boom Boom was recorded, the group has developed a whole new repertoire, and that's what the five musicians will be focusing on.

      It falls to pianist Híƒ ¥vard Wiik to explain this new direction, and this he does, on the line from his home in Oslo.

      "The repertoire is based on new compositions, but some of the compositions are more, like, group-based now," he says. "It's not so concentrated on playing solo after solo; the music is more of a collective responsibility. But it still sounds like Atomic."

      By which he means that the group continues to explore a huge range of musical textures, although the new compositions might be more contrapuntal and less linear than their predecessors. Listen closely, and you might even hear traces of Arnold Schoenberg, the pioneering modernist whose music is currently Wiik's passion.

      "Probably just in my piano-playing," he cautions. "I can't guarantee for the others."

      Wiik will get to take a more explicitly chamber music-influenced approach in Free Fall, the trio he shares with Atomic bassist Ingebrigt Híƒ ¥ker Flaten and Chicago-based clarinetist Ken Vandermark. (Free Fall plays the Western Front on Friday [June 24], and joins forces with local clarinet virtuoso Franíƒ §ois Houle for a free performance at Performance Works on Saturday.)

      "We're enjoying the freedom of not having a drummer, to put it mildly," he explains. "So we try to get into the sound aspects of the music, as we have the ability to play really softly or really loud. Free Fall is definitely more abstract than Atomic, in many ways."

      Abstract or not, both bands share the all-embracing spirit that, for Wiik, is the essence of jazz. "Yeah, everybody's like that, from Charlie Parker to Evan Parker," he concludes. "They drew from a lot of different influences, and I think that's what's so nice about this music. It kind of expects you to."

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