By Bill Milkowski | Published April 2019
When a power trio can share the stage comfortably with the likes of John McLaughlin and Black Sabbath, you know two things: They rock hard, yet provide enough harmonic content and improvisational daring to make it interesting. Norway’s Hedvig Mollestad Trio does precisely that on its sixth album. Recorded live in the studio, Smells Funny is a metal-jazz excursion that often tips into the Sonny Sharrock zone, fueled by Ellen Brekken’s rumbling bass, Ivar Loe Bjørnstad’s insistent pulse and Mollestad’s hellacious chops and fertile imagination.
From the crunching opener “Beastie, Beastie” to the odd-metered, Mahavishnu-esque “First Thing To Pop Is The Eye,” the trio is remarkably tight, unapologetically loud and surging with energy. The lone ballad here, the delicate “Jurášek,” features Brekken on upright bass and has Bjørnstad underscoring with a loosely swinging, interactive touch on the kit.
“Sugar Rush Mountain,” which opens like Mollestad’s answer to The Allman Brothers’ anthemic “Whipping Post,” eventually heads into full-blown Hendrixian territory. A free-jazz interlude, “Bewitched, Dwarfed And Defeathered,” provides a kinetic platform for Mollestad to launch into some of her skronkiest fusillades of the set. And the raucous closer, “Lucidness,” is a rubato noise-jazz romp that might draw its inspiration from Hendrix’s “Third Stone From the Sun,” while building to the “shards of splintered glass” approach of Sharrock and Pete Cosey.
When Frank Zappa famously said, “Jazz is not dead, it just smells funny,” he was referring to a moldering of the music. The Hedvig Mollestad Trio aims at providing an antidote with this audacious outing.
Smells Funny: Beastie, Beastie; First Thing To Pop Is The Eye; Jurášek; Sugar Rush Mountain; Bewitched, Dwarfed And Defeathered; Lucidness. (34:50)
Personnel: Hedvig Mollestad Thomassen, guitar; Ellen Brekken, bass; Ivar Loe Bjørnstad, drums.
