"Over the last decade, saxophonist Håkon Kornstad has emerged as one of Norway's most original and daring musicians". --Downbeat
Håkon Kornstad- Genre- Defying Tenor Sax and Vocals
San Francisco Jazz, April 18th
The (opera) Tenor Who Plays Tenor (sax)
Norwegian saxophonist Håkon Kornstad uses instrumental skill, live looping, and his imagination to become a one-man orchestra, creating minimalist grooves, freeform elegies, eastern mysticism, and jazz balladry. Adding his newly trained operatic tenor voice, he brings forth an unprecedented sound, merging jazz improvisation with the grandeur of opera. He is the tenor who plays tenor.
“My performances,” he says, “combine solo saxophone improvisation with extended techniques such as multiphonics and slap tongue, approached not as effects, but as melodic and expressive tools. The music unfolds with an elegiac, romantic, and often melancholic character. Sound layers are gently built using an intentionally outdated looping device, used solely to support and vary the improvisation rather than to foreground technology. On top of these textures, the voice enters as a kind of remembered sound fragments drawn from the golden age of classical singing.
“Rather than full operatic arias, which prove too dramatic for this environment, I work with stretched citations and lyrical excerpts from composers such as Tosti, Respighi, Gluck, and Purcell. The Nordic song tradition is equally central, with music by Grieg and Sibelius, alongside Nordic hymns and sacred songs. Together, these elements form an intimate sound world where improvisation, memory, and song coexist.”
The word “modern” itself is now more than a hundred years old, and Kornstad is not a modern musician in the old-fashioned sense of the term. Rather, the music reaches further within, borrowing unexpected fragments from earlier musical worlds. In doing so, it is jazz standing on the shoulders of its ideals in a new way — not through quotation or pastiche, but through lived memory and transformation. Prepare yourself for a concert that moves freely between abstraction and intimacy, between searching lines and beautiful melodies you may find yourself whistling on the way home.
“Håkon Kornstad and his 'Tenor Battle' troupe have fashioned a triumphant Bartók-reversal, the successful re-contextualizing of high-end tropes into the folk firmament.” --Spencer Grady, Kornstad Ensemble – St Martin-in-the-Fields, London - Jazzwise Magazine (UK)
“His project is a musical enrichment for everyone who loves classical music, as well as those who like it when musicians yearn for the unknown. There is something magical, almost timeless, and yet innovative and challenging in the way they treat these songs.” --Svein Andersen, Samstemt Tenor - Aftenposten (Norway)
“Of all the fusions that jazz has embraced over the past century, Kornstad's must rank as one of the most unlikely and as one of the most adventurous. And, based on this beautiful performance, one of the most successful.” --Ian Patterson, Vossa Jazz - All About Jazz
Born in Oslo, Norway in 1977, Håkon Kornstad took up the clarinet in grammar school and eventually turned to the saxophone and studies at the Trondheim Jazz Conservatory. Known for its emphasis on artistic identity, Kornstad emerged from Trondheim with a distinct voice whose strength was soon manifest in professional success. Even before leaving the Conservatory, he began putting it to work in what would become Wibutee, a group embraced by a community of artists centered around the contemporary music club Blå where pianist Bugge Wesseltoft heard and signed him to the Jazzland Recordings label in 1998. Alongside Wibutee, Kornstad organized an acoustic group that the Kongsberg Jazz Festival selected in 2002 for its annual award for the Norwegian musician or group of the year. Kornstad released his first solo effort as the album Single Engine (2007), a work that showed he had come fully into his own. One of Norway's leading newspapers, Dagbladet, understood its significance, calling it “the definitive transition from 'promising' to 'mature and original.'” His second solo album, Dwell Time (2009) is a solo saxophone performance recorded in Oslo's Sofienberg Church where, in real time, Kornstad records short bits of melody and percussive sound into a looping device that plays them back and, as he adds more, becomes an orchestra that accompanies him. Downbeat magazine's review was typical of the album's reception in the press, calling Kornstad “one of Norway's most original and daring musicians.”