Jaga Jazzist featured in The Observer
Jaga Jazzist is called the ”new new thing for 2004” in an extensive article in the British newspaper the Observer. The 10-piece jazz band is praised as “the finest party band to have emerged from the place where rock, jazz and dance music meet.”
When we first started, we were called ‘Fucking Jazz Musician’, but we changed after a month of two”, Martin Horntveth, one tenth of the Jaga explains to journalist Kitty Empire. Empire writes that “their dry humour - evident in titles such as I Could Have Killed Him in the Sauna, from their latest album, The Stix - is just one of the many pleasures of Jaga Jazzist”.
Year by year, Jaga Jazzist have built their reputation on the British Isles. Their debut album A Livingroom Hush was voted the best jazz release of 2003 by BBC, and their second album The Stix was well received by, among others, The Times in two separate reviews. Says Bungey on the latest Jaga release: "This is the avant-garde with a smile on its face". In another review, Sharon O'Connell awards The Stix four out of five stars and describes the collective as a "ten-piece improv outfit that confounds expectations. The Stix is challenging, but accessible, an inventive playful thing which skitters across territories occupied by Chick Corea, Weather Report and Four Tet, avoiding definition as it goes".
“Formed in the mid-Nineties around the nucleus of percussionist Horntveth, his multi-instrumentalist brother Lars (who was 14 at the time), tuba-playing sister Line and an expanding coterie of musicians, they were determined to make a big, joyful racket that knew no boundaries of genre, “ the Observer writes.
Now, multi-instrumentalist Lars Horntveth has entered the studio alone, and the result is on shelves in Norwegian music stores right now. His solo album Pooka, released this week at the Smalltown Supersound label, has already received enthusiastic reviews, here from Norwegian daily Dagbladet: “the multi-instrumental musician is known as string arranger for an impressive numbers of our most known Norwegian rock bands, from Turbonegro to Briskeby. Now Horntveth debuts with an instrumental solo album, almost a jazz-pop influenced eight movements orchestral work. Eight stringers create the core of the music, with a delicate, rhythmic comp, underlined by electronic programmed rhythm effects.” Pooka is expected to be released abroad later this spring.
Read the whole article in The Observer here.
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