BUGGE WESSELTOFT - It's Snowing On My Piano
Bugge alone at the piano, he meditates over a few melodies, Christmas melodies. Sounds banal, but is of moving beauty. No one else could evoke such a feeling, so atmospherically dense. And this with music that one might think has been interpreted: Wesseltoft's solo, many have told us, is the only Christmas music they can still listen to.
Or as the WAZ wrote with plenty of understatement: “In its almost otherworldly beauty, this is the greatest Christmas CD that contemporary jazz has ever produced.”
And this is not the judgment of a lonely jazz fan in a newspaper office, Bugge's solo is the best-selling album ever released by ACT. Where now the albums of Nils Landgren, Michael Wollny, and E.S.T. are also coming out, and...
Only this doesn't explain why Bugge's meditations are so captivating, because actually not much happens. Except that Bugge gives each note the lifespan it needs to really be heard. Each chord a little epoch that rises, holds, and fades away. Listening as if one has never heard before. Wesseltoft does not "deconstruct," he does not "recompose," rather it is as if he wanders through the spaces between the notes. As if each note guides the next along a path, as if one glides gently through a dream world of sounds, led by an invisible hand.
This gains an intensity that reaches back into childhood, when one was able to eavesdrop on the sounds of everything around them. When one could be sure that a melody, played intimately, could summon angels. And indeed, when Bugge recorded the album – Siggi Loch, the head of ACT, had asked him to improvise over a painting by American artist Ardy Strüwer that hung in Nils Landgren's apartment; title of the painting: “It’s Snowing On My Piano” – Bugge had his little daughter Maren on his lap, she was two and a half years old, the first listener of his meditations, the first to feel his playing.
When the album was released in Advent 1997, Oslo's largest daily newspaper DAGBLADET wrote: “Bugge Wesseltoft has recorded the most beautiful Christmas record I have ever heard.” And slowly, like his playing, the experience made its rounds: in 2005, Bugge played his meditations live in Oslo for the first time in front of just a hundred listeners: "I started to play quietly and slowly, just like on the album. After a few songs, I could hear the deep breathing of the audience. 'Oh God, this must be so boring for them,' I thought, and was sure they would all leave at the break. But after the concert, everyone told me what a great experience it had been for them."
The Christmas experience. In 2010, Bugge took it on a small, select concert tour for the first time, one of the five concerts was played with us. Now he is coming back for an incredibly beautiful evening.
Or let’s put it this way: Wesseltoft, mastermind of European jazz, a citizen of the world of music, who can open himself unreservedly to everything that sounds meaningful, but who himself has little to do with church and Christmas and all that, he can do the impossible, he can bring Christmas without kitsch.
Hallo, ich bin Maya.
