Hedvig Mollestad - 'Tempest Revisited' - Nov 19

Norway has a rich, too often overlooked tradition of turning out strikingly original, emotionally powerful jazz and experimental music. That tradition, going back to pioneers like Jan Garbarek, has never been more vibrant – thanks in large part to the tireless efforts of guitarist-composer Hedvig Mollestad.

On her latest album, Tempest Revisited — out November 19 via Rune Grammofon — Mollestad takes some cues from the past but remains steadfastly committed to forging a clear path of her own, bridging the riff-packed progressive jazz she creates with the trio she’s steered for the better part of a decade and a more nuanced, ethereal sound that’s steeped in nature.

"Working with material for Tempest Revisited, in the middle of all that pathos and passion, I really wanted to bring out a big fat riff that could merge broad smiles and head-banging, and where the band could really smash away," says Hedvig of the track. "I wanted a title with a sense of humor, still attached to the topic of tempest, and I also wanted to have fun with the reeds, hence the really long coda where the saxes and guitar are up against each other with two different patterns, in the end finding together in the final massive thunders of the storm."

The album, which she and a loosely-configured sextet recorded in 2019, bears the “Revisited” tag because it’s something of a bookend to The Tempest, a work by electronic musician Arne Nordheim, one of Norway´s greatest composers, which was unveiled in 1998 at the opening of Parken, a cultural house in Ålesund, the birthplace of Hedvig Mollestad.