Arve Henriksen: the sound of movement

Trumpeter Arve Henriksen talks about his collaboration with English National Ballet at the Bath Festival.

By Ivan Hewett

The jazz trumpet can take on many different sounds – obstreperous and virtuoso with Dizzy Gillespie, exquisitely tired with Miles Davis, defiant and cheerful with Armstrong. But, when it goes into Nordic regions, the jazz trumpet becomes strange indeed, evocative of vast frozen spaces and the Northern Lights. There’s now a whole school of Nordic trumpeters, and Norwegian Arve Henriksen is perhaps the best known of them. He makes an extraordinary breathy sound that has been likened to Balkan folk-singers and even to the sound of whalesong.

Next month, Henriksen’s otherwordly music will be heard in the unexpected surroundings of Bath Abbey, thanks to a bright idea of one of Henriksen’s British fans, the pianist Joanna MacGregor. She is director of the Bath International Festival, and this year has invited English National Ballet to create a new dance to music by Henriksen. He’ll be playing himself in the performance, but, as he admits, it will be a very different sort of experience to his usual gigs.

“Normally I play in improvised settings,” he says. “But here I’m working with the orchestra of the ballet company. A musician colleague of mine, Helge Sunde, has made an orchestral version of some music on my recent album, Cartography.” This is a surprise because, at first glance, Henriksen’s music seems singularly resistant to orchestral arrangement. His trumpet soars and swoops on a bed of strange electronic sounds, produced by Henriksen’s long-time collaborator Jan Bang.

“Making that album was a long process because Jan and I were often in different places working on different projects. He would create these wonderful sounds in the studio and then send them to me as sound files by email, and I would change something or add something, and send it back to him. It took two and a half years altogether.” Was it just the two of them or were there other musicians involved? “Oh, lots of people contributed something. Jan wanted to include Trio Medieval [a Norwegian all-female trio of singers who specialise in medieval music], but at the time he only had his Dictaphone with him, so he used that to record then mix it in. You can hear that on the album.”

It turns out that this isn’t Henriksen’s first encounter with dance. “Some years ago, I worked with a Norwegian dance company, and I was actually on stage with the dancers. It was scary but exciting to have these dancers actually touching me as they danced around. And, in fact, the choreographer got me to do some movements myself.”

This time things are different. English National Ballet principal dancer Dmitri Gruzdyev is putting the choreography together while Henriksen is working on a brand new project. But he’s not at all fazed by the idea of turning up and playing along to an interpretation of his music conceived by someone he hasn’t even met. “I enjoy it when people just react to my ideas. I really don’t want to guide them in any way, all I said was, 'Just pick what you want and go with the flow.’”

This easy-going attitude is bound up with Henriksen’s essentially communal view of creativity. “I always say two heads are better than one – that’s why my best things come out when I work with people like Jan. I think we should all be more willing to borrow from each other.” It’s a nice sentiment, but if everything on a musical recording is shared who gets the royalties? “Well, of course I understand if I mix some of Brian Eno’s music into my own, or if I add a trumpet line to one of Sting’s songs, I can’t release it! But I can certainly learn a lot. It’s a challenge to bring something different and maybe a little bit alien into your music, because then you have to think, 'How can I make a form out of this? How can I integrate all these things?’”



For Henriksen, combining his music with dance is the natural and logical next step in this process. “There’s a natural affinity between the art forms. You can express a musical scale of dynamics with the body, and in music you can have something like a dancer’s gesture. But what I really remember from my experience in dance is how similar the processes were of making dance and making music. You try things out, you weigh and balance different options.

“In art it’s always a matter of working out the consequences of a particular action. If I make a phrase that has a feeling of a question, then this creates a need for something that 'answers’ this phrase. Or, if you build tension you may need to release it. So I’m hoping that at this performance in Bath there will be this kind of instant creativity, where I see something in the dance that touches me and then respond to it.”
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/music/worldfolkandjazz/7771240/Arve-Henriksen-the-sound-of-movement.html