INTERVIEW: For some time now, the Norwegian saxophonist Harald Lassen has gotten us used to tightrope acts between jazz phrasing and harmonies on the one hand and pop experiments on the other. His album release Balans confirms that he is one of the most fascinating voices of his generation.
Following Eventyrer, released in 2018, and Human Samling, created and released in the middle of the lockdown, Harald Lassen released Balans in 2024 on Jazzland Recordings. The album received the Spellemann Prize in Jazz and was recorded with Solveig Wang (keyboards), Sander Eriksen Nordahl (guitar), Stian Andersen (bass) and Tore Flatjord (drums). It distills troubling atmospheres, spiritual lurches during which the breath of the saxophone seems to want to open the windows wide, romantic passages and an avowed quest for balance, which indeed make it his most beautiful album to date.
After the groups Mopti and Pixel, Lassen now assumes his name and his role as leader of a group that is more than ever ready to take the roads of Europe. Here is a musician well aware of the social and societal role of music that we happily present in these columns.
Theres’s a coherence from one album to another in the last 10 years. Due IMO to a fidelity to some creative processes, the sounds of nature, a search for purity and vulnerability, and glances in the rearview mirror towards the representatives of a certain kind of spiritual jazz (let’s say late 60s-early 70s), accentuated by the presence of the drummer Tore Flatjord for 8 years. Would you like to quickly evoke a particular aspect of the evolution of your music at a time when you are probably working on a new album. Where are you now?
– Well, I like to think of my work as a piece of art in progress that I’m constantly developing. When I stop making music or die, the catalog will be the complete piece – not each individual album. That perspective helps me move forward and see the bigger picture— a quality I wish was more present in today’s world.
I actually see myself as very fluid, certainly not particularly stylistic, even though you can’t escape the reference language you’ve built up over time. The music and my taste simply follow wherever I am in life at any given moment. But honestly, I think people are too focused on finding “their sound” and, even worse, their “thing”. It may work out well, but… I think on the contrary that one of the most important things an artist can do is being “illegal” to themselves. In other words, one of the most important things an artist can do is to break their own rules.
As for the upcoming album, it’s still a creature I’m getting to know. Eventually, we’ll probably become close friends, until I realize we’re a bit too similar. Then it’ll become more of an acquaintance, usually after it’s released. But I can say it feels like a sibling to Balans.
Harald Lassen Balans (press photo)
I like the feeling of space present in your music. It shows a way of functioning as a collective. Is it a way of leaving space to surprise each other? Even in the context of a concert. I could see this last October in Kolben where I saw the band live.
– The rule could be “Surprise me. Surprise each other. Surprise yourself!” I think my band has heard me saying that a few times… Spontaneous ideas bring great energy to a band— even the most subtle ones. And even though my music largely revolves around songs, I emphasize leaving room for those “what now?” moments.
I do like to take relatively high risks and often search to feel uncomfortable. Maybe it’s more like an addiction. Because when it goes wrong, I suffer—through sleepless nights and self-loathing. But when magic happens, I feel immensely rich!
You saw me open for Nils Frahm at Oslo Spektrum Arena, last fall as well, with a trio I had never played with before. It was exhausting and kind of stupid, sure, but I felt incredibly alive.
A short word about the other collective projects, how do you choose them? For what reasons, with what motivations?
– To be honest, when I’m lucky enough to have a choice, I focus on what gives me good energy. Most artists are underpaid compared to the work they put in, so good energy and a rich inner life must be the minimum compensation.
If I step away from a project, it’s usually because I feel the artistic process has run its course, or because I’m not able to use my full potential. The only project where I can accept unrealized potential is in my own band. That, after all, is a huge artistic driving force.
I’m curious to know: why choosing a French title “Sentiment Constant” for this uncanny atmospheric song, worthy of Angelo Badalamenti’s work for the soundtracks of David Lynch’s films?
– I’ve spent a couple of solo stays in the small mountain town of Vence, north of Nice. It’s a beautiful, everyday kind of place with a warm undertone of wistfulness. My whole life, wistfulness has been a constant feeling — hence the tittle sentiment constant ! One of the many analog photos I’ve taken there even ended up inside the cover of Balans. A tree and a house — my favorite motifs.
I wouldn’t call myself a Francophile, but I’m deeply fascinated by cultural nations like France — though I imagine that in times like these it could be in decline? The fashion history, haute couture houses with their artists captivate me. And the classical music. I hold Francis Poulenc’s choral works in particularly high regard.
Speaking of church music: I watched the reopening ceremony of Notre-Dame, when some of the world’s best organists unleash themselves with long and extreme improvisations in front of populist world leaders and a global audience steeped in cultural decline. That requires a kind of historical and cultural confidence I think you’d never see in Norway.
I know you are committed and aware of the challenges in the music industry. In 2024, what are the questions in your mind you when you consider doing concerts outside Norway?
– As you point out: I am deeply engaged with important world issues. Nature and environment crisis IS the world’s most important cause. However, we live in a hyper-political era where everything is politicized. Opinions, slogans, campaigns, and boycotts are hammered into our eyes and ears everywhere, all the time.
Creating spaces where our minds can take a break and where thoughts can both run freely and be sorted is anything but passive. It is action. I believe it’s crucial for a better world: help people enriching their inner lives and think clearly.
Art can teach us to exist in an abstract and complex world. Activism, unfortunately, rarely manages to do that.
Interview by Anne Yven – first published in Citizen Jazz
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