ROOTS 2
For big band with text (and voice) and video
Article from Sistesio
"When it's painful and difficult, something good can still come out of it. We should not glorify suffering, but history shows that learning to know other cultures brings wealth. There is a melancholy here, but also a power."
Text, video and voice
Text and voice by Frode Grytten
Film by Anne Marthe Dyvi
Duration
55 minutes
First performance /Commissioned by
Premiere at Husnes, 2023
Commissioned by Bergen Big Band
Press
"On Saturday evening, it was so clear for the concert that perhaps the greatest expectations were attached to: the 18-musician Bergen Big Band's hour-long performance of Knut Vaage's "Røter II". The work was presented as the orchestra performed it at Husnes jazz club earlier this year - with video art by Anne Marthe Dyvi, a number of top-class soloists - and with a gripping text written and performed by Frode Grytten. We have now moved completely into jazzland, with a sound and a punch that is no match for either Duke Ellington, Count Basie or Carla Bley. The alternately swinging and intimately seductive music simply deserves to be performed on the world's biggest jazz stages. Led by Michael Barnes, this is a top-class band, in which great solos are woven in. Frode Grytten's very current and poignant text reading, which once again confirmed the old expression that jazz and poetry go hand in glove.Around a frame story about a young boy's development, we got glimpses both of the rise of jazz music and the structural racism that is still alive and well in jazz's homeland. "
"The piece is about roots in many senses. It's my roots, it's Frode Grytten's roots. In the first version, all the musicians were allowed to come up with a sentence about where they came from, but it was too complicated to include in this one . Those are our common roots, but they are all human."
