Paal Nilssen-Love Lives & Loves Large

News, From the Magazine, Paal Nilssen-Love

By Peter Margasak I Sep. 26, 2023

“I’m not going to reinvent the wheel, but maybe I can reinvent things for myself,” says Paal Nilssen-Love.
(Photo: Lars Opstad/KLADD.no)

On the evening of Saturday, March 25, Norwegian drummer Paal Nilssen-Love was sitting on the stage of the respected Oslo club Victoria–Nasjonal Jazzscene.

He was being interviewed by Lasse Marhaug, a veteran sound artist and graphic designer, who’s worked with the drummer for decades. In the midst of the conversation Sebastian Uul, performing as Mr. Orkester — an unhinged one-man band — burst into from the rear of the club, turning the proceedings delightfully upside-down. The gathering was the third and final night marking the 10th anniversary of the Nilssen-Paul’s raucous big band Large Unit, and the drummer was determined to make the occasion both outsized and full of surprises.

Between March 23 and 25, he brought together some 40 participants, an international cast of past collaborators (including Japanese reedist Akira Sakata, Amsterdam-based guitarists Terrie Hessels and Andy Moor) and a large contingent of Ethiopian musicians and dancers connected to the Fendika Cultural Center in Addis Ababa. But the central figures of the nightly program were the sprawling crew of Scandinavian musicians that constitute Large Unit. Nilssen-Love also presented a variety of soloists and smaller groupings drawn from the Large Unit ranks, past and present, to say nothing of nightly DJ sets and short sets from deadpan magician Jon Øystein Flink.

Nilssen-Love formed the band in 2013, and the ensemble has persevered through line-up changes, economic difficulties and a pandemic. Obviously, the pandemic put a major damper on that practice and, during the early lockdowns, it took the wind out of his creative sails. “I lost all motivation for playing music,” he says. “There was no joy in practicing or playing because it was all so bloody abstract.” Still, Large Ensemble has emerged — arguably stronger, more unified and more creatively vital than ever.

The group performed wildly different sets each night, with the stellar assortment of guests, whether it was Dutch guitarists bookending the stage with their typical manic energy and gestural noise on a new piece one night, or the raft of Ethiopian musicians and dancers turning the occasion into an all-out party as they reprised pieces from the collaborative album Ethiobraz released in 2019. The venue was festooned with traditional Ethiopian scarves and strings of colored lights, in an attempt to recreate the vibe of Fendika. Speaking to Nilssen-Love a few weeks after the shows in Oslo and around Norway, he was in the midst of filling out paperwork required to secure the funding that made the whole crazy endeavor possible.

Few figures in improvised music are as hard-working, relentless and social as Nilssen-Love, who has routinely spent more than 200 nights of each year on the road, going back decades. After spending years as the drummer in an excellent Scandinavian post-bop quintet, working in the gritty power trio the Thing, helping power the Peter Brötzmann Chicago Tentet and playing in countless other bands — both fully improvised and tune-driven — he decided to finally launch his own band with Large Unit, initially designing a series of loose compositions designed to inspire exciting improvisation from a stellar group of musicians. Despite years of experience, the drummer was learning how to run a band on the fly when they began touring in Norway in 2014.

“That was the first time taking my band or a band that I was leading on the road, creating a setlist and needing to figure who’s taking a solo on such-and-such,” he says. “On the first gig, it was perfect. This works fine. So we did it the second night, and I think we did it the third night. And then you could sense that people knew what was going to come. They were all so relaxed, so well rested.”

But Nilssen-Love wanted more. He wanted the band to be on edge and ready for the unexpected, so he began changing the set list and how the band traverses the compositions.

“On the first U.S. tour [in 2015], I started cutting pieces into two or three. We would start, let’s say, on the third part of one song, go back to the first part of another one and back to the second of the initial song. That refreshed the music and it also kept people extremely focused.”

He also learned how difficult it was to maintain an ensemble with a dozen members over the long haul. Lives change — musicians get married, have children, get busy — so the lineup changes occasionally. The drummer found that he enjoyed the new energy, and at one point considered dismissing unavailable musicians, but he also recognized the commitment of the musicians who have stuck with him for years, if not the entire decade. In fact, several former Large Unit members, including trumpeter Thomas Johansson and tuba player Børre Mølstad, turned up for the Oslo celebration to perform as alumni of the band. Nilssen-Love now keeps a steady stable of around 18 musicians in the fold, so there’s always knowledgeable backups ready to go, with new faces like the versatile reedist Marthe Lea adding fresh ideas. Still, membership requires a certain devotion, as the material he’s been writing for the group requires serious focus.

At the tail end of 2022, the band released two new albums recorded in September 2021. It was the first time the musicians had convened in nearly two years. The music on Clusterfuck and New Map, both released on the drummer’s PNL imprint, reveal distinctly new directions for a 15-member iteration of the band, with material Nilssen-Love conceived of during the pandemic. The core of the first album is built around a graphic score, while the second utilizes map-like notation to organize a dozen discrete compositional cells. “It’s bloody difficult to make it work,” he says of New Map. “It demands that people pay attention, take space, give space, move the music. There’s a few rules, like one of the cells I just want that to be played for 10 bars or whatever. When it works, it’s absolutely fantastic,” an assessment proven by the recorded version, which is as uncharacteristically tender and lyric — with gentle harp and accordion pierced by skronky guitar during one passages — as it is abstract and jagged. It’s ideal execution relies on all of the musicians taking initiative, which has happened slowly, but Nilsson-Love said he’s thrilled that tuba player Per-Åke Holmlander, an original member of the band with loads of experience navigating the procedures of multiple large improvising ensembles (including the Brötzmann Tentet and Ken Vandermark’s Territory Band), has proven especially invested. “He’s just on fire, let’s do more, write more, which is very encouraging for me.”

While Nilssen-Love expresses excitement for new possibilities for the core line-up of Large Unit, he also can’t stop connecting the group with other musicians from around the globe. His deep interest in global music and international collaborators stretches back to the late 1990s, when he and bassist Ingebrit Håker Flaten, a bandmate in multiple combos over the years, worked with the South African saxophonist Zim Ngqawana, a connection made through the Norwegian reedist Bjørn Ole Solberg. That experience, which included making several albums and international tours, helped the drummer use improvisation to connect with musicians from far-flung locales. Back then, the drummer played Ngqawana’s pianist Andile Yenana a recording he’d made with the Sten Sandell Trio, and after learning that the entire performance was improvised he expressed shock. It was a reaction he encountered again years later with the Ethiopian percussionist Mesay Abebaye.

“He asked me, ‘Hey, Paal, what do you call this?’ I said, ‘What do you mean?’ He replied, ‘What’s the style we just played? Is it swing? Is it bossa?’ I said, ‘No, it’s just improvised music.’ Maybe it’s wrong of me saying so, but unfortunately, he had to put it in a box so he can understand what it was. Because his idea of just walking on stage and improvising — he would do it, but always tagging it onto a rhythm.”

During a workshop in Brazil he first met Paulino Bicolor, a master of the indigenous percussion instrument called the cuica. “We were sitting down doing these different exercises — just making sounds and scribbles, and shadowing each other — and there was nothing related to Brazilian [music] about what we were doing,” he explains. “That made him curious to jump over to the other side. I find it interesting that in the end, you’re free in all of the styles in all of what you know, through experience.”

Before long Bicolor had become a member of a new Nilssen-Love ensemble called New Brazilian Funk.

These global connections inspire the drummer. “Let’s say I go to a country, and I really love what’s going on there in terms of culture, music, food, dance,” he says. “I would like more people to experience it because I’ve been there, and I’ve felt how the strength of it, and I want to share that.” He’s well aware of the inequalities that exist between his privileged position as a citizen of a wealthy European nation and many of the places he’s visited, and for most of his trips to Ethiopia he’s worked hard to leave something in return. On his first trip to Addis Ababa he brought a bundle of old drumsticks and local musicians pounced on them. He noticed one kid practicing with the same sort of sticks he uses. “But his was 4 centimeters shorter. That’s the drumsticks he’s had for I don’t know how many years. There was not much left.”

A few months before the Oslo celebration, the Large Unit traveled to Ethiopia to perform and lead workshops at the Yared Music School. Before leaving, Nilssen-Love put out a call for musicians to donate equipment and instruments to take along with them.

“We brought tons of instruments with us,” he says. “If you’re gonna go there, and you’ve got so many resources, then bring as much as you can. You’ll be invited to somebody’s home — which is very, very small, probably a fourth of your living room — you are given so much, offered so much food, so much drink, the hospitality and generosity is beyond ... and I think most the guys in the band were in shock. It just shows that despite the little they have, they’ll always share. Then you go back home and you see the wealth, which becomes quite disgusting when people did not share at all.”

When the musicians returned from Ethiopia after the tour, they filled their suitcases with traditional scarves, which were sold at the festival in Oslo, with all of the proceeds going back to a school for the blind in Addis.

Nilssen-Love remains involved with many other projects, including Circus, a septet that dials back some of the aggression and introduces a dramatic element through singer Juliana Venter; Arashi, his trio with Sakata and bassist Johan Berthling; and a new improvising quartet called Sun & Steel with younger figures on the Norwegian scene, including saxophonist Lea, a relative newcomer to Large Unit. But he plans to keep Large Unit active. A new recording by Extra Large Unit (with a line-up that practically doubles the usual number of musicians) recorded last year at the Oslo Jazz Festival is due out soon, and the drummer hopes to perform the recent material at a series of European shows in the fall. “I’m still also pushing myself to write music and to try write different things which I haven’t heard before, or I haven’t heard the guys in the bands play before, or I haven’t experienced before,” he says. I’m not going to reinvent the wheel, but maybe I can reinvent things for myself.” DB