One of the highlights of this year’s festival! We are incredibly happy to be able to present an exceptionally vital combo – an American Norwegian collaboration that has been going strong for 12 years and garnered euphoric reviews, but never before taken to the Stavanger stage. Pianist Jason Moran and Trondheim Jazz Orchestra met in 2013 when Moran was “Artist in Residence” at Molde Jazz Festival and has since taken audiences by storm several times in Oslo and Trondheim. In 2025, the collaboration resulted in a digital album, “Go to Your North“.
Jason Moran began to cause a stir in the late 1990s after dabbling in hip-hop, converting to jazz after hearing Thelonious Monk’s “Round About Midnight” and graduating from the Manhattan School of Music. Since then, he has worked with multiple jazz legends, led his own bands and scored high – often at the very top – in the votes for “pianist of the year”, “jazz musician of the year” and so on.
Moran is impossible to put in a box in terms of style. He has a modern side but is equally at home in hard-swinging bebop-based and modal jazz, is good at making creative use of the legacy of older style creators such as Monk and Fats Waller – and likes to mix in a little hip-hop and funk.
Since the turn of the millennium, Trondheim Jazz Orchestra has established itself as one of Norway’s most exciting improvisational music ensembles. It grew out of the jazz program at NTNU and today presents itself as an ongoing project more than as a band with a fixed form and line-up. Trondheim Jazz Orchestra has a flat and flexible structure, as well as the size and members that are suitable for the occasion!
The orchestra has placed itself firmly on the international jazz map by inviting foreign stars such as Chick Corea, Pat Metheny, Joshua Redman and now Jason Moran to come and play concerts with them, with the stars’ own compositions arranged by the orchestra’s talented members on the program. Some who have received such invitations might have wondered what would await them in Trondheim, but if there was any sign of scepticism in the beginning, it did not last long. Corea fell completely in love with the band, toured with it several times and brought it over to New York on the occasion of its 75th birthday celebration at the Blue Note jazz club. Recordings also followed.
While Trondheim Jazz Orchestra’s long-time conductor Erling Skomsvoll managed the collaboration with Corea, it is the orchestra’s bassist and artistic director from 2017 to 2025, Ole Morten Vågan, who has put his name to the arrangements of Moran’s music. Welcome to an intense experience!
Jason Moran – on piano
Sofia Jernberg – on vocals
Henriette Eilertsen – on flute
Mette Rasmussen – on alto saxophone
Jonas Kullhammar – on tenor saxophone, flute
Karl Hjalmar Nyberg – on tenor sax
Eirik Hegdal – on baritone saxophone, Soprano saxophone
Eivind Lønning – on trumpet
Josefin Runsteen – on violin, viola
Hans Hulbækmo – on drums
Anja Lauvdal – on synth/electronics
Daniel Herskedal – on tuba
Joel Ring – on cello
Ole Morten Vågan – on bass, arrangements
Tor Breivik – sound engineer
Photo: Thor Egil Leitro
Time and place:
Fiskepiren, Wednesday 6 May at 19:00 hrs.
