La Notte

Commissioned by the Molde International Jazz Festival and recorded live at the Norwegian festival in 2010, La notte is a salute to Italian filmmaker Michelangelo Antonioni, whom Ketil Bjornstad counts amongst his formative influences. At the same time that I was listening to Miles Davis In A Silent Way and discovering what jazz could be, I was also watching films by Godard, Bresson and Antonioni. Perhaps it was the slow, rhythmic authority in the films by Michelangelo Antonioni that made me think of music... As long as visual art creates music in our minds, and music creates pictures and visual expressions with the same intensity, the two are deeply and profoundly interdependent. This album, then, can be considered the soundtrack to an inner film, in which Antonionis images and atmospheres are translated and transformed through personal moods and memories. For the Molde concert, Bjornstad convened a special Norwegian-Danish-German-British band of musicians, old and new friends closely associated with ECM. The concert was rapturously received by the media, and described as an absolutely stunning performance by All About Jazz.