Name: Nils Petter Molvaer
Nationality: Norwegian
Occupation: Trumpet player, improviser, composer
Current release: Nils Petter Molvaer's Certainty of Tides is out October 6th via Modern Recordings.

If you enjoyed this Nils Petter Molvaer interview and would like to stay up to date with his music, projects, and tour dates, visit his official homepage. He is also on Facebook.

To keep reading, check out our previous Nils Petter Molvaer interview.

Over the course of his career, Nils Petter Molvaer has collaborated with and been remixed by a wide range of artists, including Jan Bang, Matthew Herbert, Bill Laswell, Eivind Aarset, Bugge Wesseltoft, Roberto Di Gioia, Vladislav Delay, Jo Berger Myhre, Jakob Bro, and Marilyn Mazur.

[Read our Jan Bang interview]
[Read our Jakob Bro interview]
[Read our Matthew Herbert interview]
[Read our Bill Laswell interview]
[Read our Eivind Aarset interview]
[Read our Bugge Wesseltoft interview]
[Read our Roberto Di Gioia interview]
[Read our Vladislav Delay interview]
[Read our Jo Berger Myhre interview]
[Read our Marilyn Mazur interview]



I saw that Roger Waters is actually now close to releasing his personal new interpretation of Dark Side of the Moon. This is a very, very idiosyncratic, new rendition and a lot of people said it's disrespectful to go back to that album and try to change history. What made it interesting for you to go back into time and revisit your own music?

Well, these are my songs and I don't think it's disrespectful. The only thing I did feel was disrespectful was the original title of one of the songs.

Initially, it was called “Little Indian,” but that was never on purpose. The piece was dedicated to my daughter Maja and it was just a play on words – Maja, Indian. But it feels offensive, so I changed it, on the recommendation of Alva Noto.

[Read our Alva Noto interview]

But more to the point, I have played most of these tracks live before and still play them live. And when we play them in concerts, we constantly change them. Not dramatically, not totally, but there's always some sort of change.

For me, when I was asked to do this with a symphony orchestra, I first tried to find songs that I could imagine being suitable for performing with an orchestra. I do play some of these songs with my big quartet now, but that's a totally different thing.

So the interesting thing was how the arrangers attacked it. All of them are high class composers of music, in their own right and I specifically asked at least a couple of them to make the new arrangement really edgy, to include harmonic structures like crystal chords or mirror chords, sometimes even clusters. And this music creates a contrast with me, I'm almost like a singer improvising a song. Also, just to stand inside an orchestra and play is an experience that I wish more people could have.

An orchestra is an instrument, the most wonderful instrument there is.  

In which way?

Simply, it's the most beautiful thing that the Western world has passed on to us. The orchestra conveys such a powerful feeling. It can be so beautifully soft, and at other times, it can be overwhelming. And it's all acoustic. It's entirely composed of a lot of people sitting in the same space. If an orchestra plays well, it can be overwhelming.

Although I have stood inside an orchestra before, I had never recorded it. So that's why I wanted to do it.

Many artists dream of working with an orchestra.

So did I. And I would say: Okay, I'll do it before I'm 50 … blah, blah, blah. And then, okay, I'll do it before I'm 60. And now I actually did it. The recording is done, and it was done before I turned 60.

What does it feel like to become part of this body of sound?

I like meditation. You become part of this focus, you no longer think about the past, you no longer think about the future, you're just in the moment 100%, listening and taking in the space, leaving the space.

I'm always nervous before I play after 40 years still, but just being in it is a very beautiful feeling.  

Were your lines for this album written out? Or were they were they improvised?

In the beginning, it's written out and then I improvise. So after after the melody has been introduced, I just move on. And the orchestra plays the written score, but the conductor is important. He can kind of follow my cues. So it's all about the interaction with the conductor.

I understand mixing the album turned into an important part of the finished product.

Indeed. I first mixed it up in Tromsø, up in the North of Norway. We had recorded everything with close mics on every instrument. And we did what we – my producer Jan Bang and me – called a re-amp.

We took 48 speakers, as many speakers as there were people in the orchestra. And we arranged the speakers exactly the way the orchestra was seated. And then we sent out the 86 tracks of the recording into the speakers. We even set up a doll of the conductor and we had some really high end microphones in the room. And this approach opened the music up a lot, you know?

So it was also an experiment in terms of the production but for me. We also had a couple of tracks where included two young electronical guys, Kristen, and Isakson and Evan and asked them to do something with the music.

You mentioned Alva Noto. I'm doing an interview with him right now – he has a new album coming out very soon.

He's a very cool guy. Yeah, I'm going to do something with him for another project. It's called “Be Quiet” and I just go and do one song with people from very different genres. So we meet and then just create one song each. And one of them is going to be with Alva Noto. We'll enter Hansa studio in October. It should be interesting.

For me, it's a little bit about genre destruction. Because genres are very narrowing. It's like you put everything into compartments: Here, this is New Jazz. This is mainstream jazz. This is Southern rock. This is a Northern rock. I'm more interested in just music.

The word contrast has come up before in this interview. Whereas I find that your music blends all of your influences into something that is completely you. And so the contrasts disappear in a way to me, because what results is your own voice.

Thank you. The point is always to make something organic and the contrast is there to create tension. But ultimately, I just want to be as precise as I can in my expression. And the way I interact with the surroundings, the musical surroundings. That is kind of my mantra.

I don't want to say too much about how I feel about music, because I just do it. And it's very much up to listeners like you, how you experience it.

Working with an orchestra is certainly a contrast to your usual modus operandi, where you'll be playing with a quartet or even a solo setting.

I think that because maybe I'm a bit of a restless person. I like to do a lot of things. I like solo things, I like to play with the Quartet, with the trio. We just did some concerts with the Khmer material again, which was a lot of fun and we're going to do another one on the 15th of October 2023. It's the last one we'll do this year but now everybody is asking for more. So I'm thinking about the possibility of just putting up a small tour with that concept next year or so.

But on the other hand, I also like to play solo, I like to play with poets. We did this small movie with this poet called Does your hand shake, Wladimir? It's translated into more than 100 languages and people are reading it. So it's like a short movie and a poetic protest to the war.

And then I'm going to do the wild duck with the National Ballet, which includes touring. After that, I'll take two to three months off to just sit in the studio. And this diversity is what I like.

Creativity can reach many different corners of our lives. Do you personally feel as though writing a piece of music is inherently different from something like making a great cup of coffee? What do you express through music that you couldn't or wouldn't in more 'mundane' tasks?

Yeah, there are similarities. It's about focus. It's similar to cooking. You have to know which kind of raw material you're using and that it's of a high quality. What goes in determines what comes out. But it's not something I think of.

Things are different for someone like Sasu Rapatti aka Vladislav Delay. When it comes to coffee, he definitely has very strong views on that, I'd say.