Translator: Midori T Reviewer: Claire Ghyselen
Thank you.
In this little talk,
I'm going to try to explain to you how a sort of healthy guy
playing the saxophone and making a living out of it
would suddenly turn to start singing opera
at the age of 32, you know, from scratch when my career finally had started moving.
What happened was that I'd just recorded my second solo album in 2009.
I was alone in a church, I was improvising,
but then, after the session, I felt really low.
I was questioning whether I was in love with the project anymore.
I was feeling that I was repeating myself even though I was improvising,
or at least said I was improvising.
I felt I'd painted myself into a corner,
and I had stopped listening to jazz.
I didn't listen to jazz anymore.
So, I felt it was sort of time for a break.
And then, I went to New York.
I went there for an inspirational stay.
And a friend of mine, a Norwegian friend,
he asked me to come with him to the Metropolitan Opera.
I thought, "Opera, okay. The smell of mothballs and Chanel No. 5."
You know, I was, "Brrr."
(Laughter)
But I came with him,
and we saw Cavalleria Rusticana
and Pagliacci,
two one-actors paired together.
And I was just blown away by the timelessness of this,
by the sheer grandeur of those mothball-smelling sets,
and by the fact that the singers,
they made the whole room tremble with their voices,
without using a microphone or technology or anything
because it was just in them.
So I started listening to singers on YouTube
and sobbing along to them, you know.
And I guess I was jet-lagged, too.
(Laughter)
But it was the tenors of the past, the really old tenors that really hit me.
And that week, I went back to the Metropolitan three times.
And I thought this was a new hobby,
but then something even stranger happened.
A performance artist in Brooklyn, he called me
and wanted me to play a solo saxophone show
in one of his art openings.
And as I was sound-checking, I met this opera singer,
and she was going to perform with him.
He was drinking Jack Daniel's and smoking pot on stage,
and he sort of pointed towards me to come on stage,
and I was reluctantly entering,
and while I was entering doing my solo show,
he actually crawled into a piano,
started banging the strings while I was playing,
like not for the reasons of making music, it seemed.
So, okay, then I thought, "I'm done with free jazz forever."
(Laughter)
(Applause)
And I sort of pointed to this great opera soprano,
and we fled from Brooklyn into Manhattan and had dinner
and decided to meet the next day.
And then we met to make some music together, to make a duo.
I would be playing the saxophone, and she would be singing.
And I just felt, "Ah, I'm repeating myself again.
This free jazz repeating thing."
And it just burst out of me, "I want to sing like that, too."
And we were in New York,
so she just picked up the phone and called her teacher,
and I had an appointment the next day.
So, I knocked on the door to Pamela -
she lived on the Upper West Side, like all the opera divas -
and she asked me,
(In high voice) "What do you want to sing?"
(Laughter)
And I said, (With Norwegian accent) "I want to sing opera."
(In high voice) "Oh, do you have any repertoire,
any arias you particularly like?"
(With Norwegian accent) "No. You see, I went to the Met last Tuesday."
(Laughter)
So, we started doing this.
I mean, we Norwegians, we have our language
(With Norwegian accent) really in the back, you know.
(Laughter)
And Italian opera is
(With Italian accent) more like this,
so you have to train to get the language on here, you know.
And we did all that, and we did like "brrr, brrr."
I thought this was so exotic. I just loved it!
(Laughter)
I remember feeling like 16 again, and this woman was telling me what to do.
And in jazz, nobody tells you anything.
(Laughter)
So ...
(Applause)
So I really knew I just had to follow this track,
I had to train to become an opera singer.
But what would my jazz peers say?
I tried to take some of them to the Met that same period.
They were like, "Yeah, very nice."
(Laughter)
So I felt sort of like a rebel
when I decided that I would say no to jazz gigs
and just train opera for one year and see what happened, you know,
just follow the track.
So I felt like a rebel inside of a rebel
because a jazz musician is supposed to be a rebel,
so I was sort of a Russian rebel doll.
But by making yourself unattractive like that, you suddenly -
or not unattractive, but, you know, unavailable -
you get attractive,
so I started getting the best gigs I've ever had
and working with great musicians
and got these wonderful reviews for this solo album
that I was complaining about earlier here.
(Laughter)
And I started to feel free in my saxophone playing.
And in 2011, two years after, I applied for the Norwegian Opera School
and got in as their oldest ever student, I guess.
(Laughter)
And you should really know that education in Norway is free,
so now I've served myself with two rather arbitrary musical education:
first, jazz and then, opera.
And I want to tell you about the jazz education in Trondheim
because it's really good, you know.
We were given almost total freedom.
We were given a key to a practice room.
That was the whole thing, really, and then, we practice and practice,
(Laughter)
like a great composer, you know.
And no, like, obligatory or what-you-call-it classes,
but now in the opera school, everything is much more mandatory,
much more teacher-driven,
and I even had to sneak away from school to be here today,
so it's a little bit different.
And it sort of sums up for me these two different musical worlds:
jazz, where you have to be your own composer,
your own label manager, your own bandleader,
whereas in opera, if you're a singer,
you're a singer, you know.
That's the only thing you have to be.
And I believe this really is changing rapidly nowadays.
At least when I get out of school, I will change it.
So, people now started to ask me,
"When are you going to combine your jazz with opera?"
And I thought, "It's not going to happen."
I was really, really negative to this at first
because I really wanted to go deeply into opera,
and I was sort of bored with jazz anyway,
and I wanted to explore a singing technique
and theatrical training and all these things
to become an opera singer.
But then there was another voice student who said to me,
(In high voice) "Well, I suppose you have to quit playing saxophone
now that you're becoming a proper opera singer,"
and I thought, "The hell, I'm not!"
(Laughter)
And then, I tried on a jazz tour.
I decided, "Now I'm finally going to try this."
And we first played something - I think it was a Swedish folk song -
and then I launched into it, singing it opera style.
And, you know, the response was amazing.
And I knew I'd found something really interesting,
and I wanted to do this, and I knew I could do this.
So, I want to try some tenor battle, because that's what I'm calling it.
I'm a tenor saxophone player and tenor singer, hopefully, today.
(Laughter)
I will try to do this,
but I will conclude this little talk first
by saying that if you ask a jazz musician if he is a rebel,
he would probably say, by default, "Yes,"
that he's sort of breaking free with the establishment
and following his inner voice and all this.
And, you know, opera is the establishment.
So, that's why so many jazz musicians
openly say that they don't like the opera, I guess.
But I think this is sort of a cliché
because, you know, Don't all art forms have their own establishment
and their own rules?
Even the most progressive ones?
And I think once I get my opera together,
I will feel as free in it as I do with my jazz.
So, let's try here now.
I have this little loop box here where I record something on the fly.
It usually works.
(Tapping on saxophone)
(Recorded tapping rhythm)
(Saxophone)
(Singing in Italian) I followed you
Like the rainbow of peace
Along the roads of the sky:
I followed you
Like a friendly figure
Imprisoned in the veil of shadows
I felt your presence
In the light, in the air,
In the scent of flowers;
Alone in my room,
But transcended
By you
And by your splendor.
(Saxophone)
Raptured
By the sound of your voice
I meditated a long time;
And every earthly trouble
And torment
was forgotten in that day.
Aaah
Come back,
Dear ideal,
Come back for one moment
And smile to me again,
In your smile there is sunshine.
To me it will look like
A new
Dawn.
A new
Dawn.
Come back, dear ideal,
Come back,
Come back.
(Applause)
Thank you.