Jaga Jazzist

This year started almost too good, with several great Norwegian albums being released. We have had Motorpsycho and Shining in the blog, og here comes Jaga Jazzist with "One-armed bandit" (2010). The prog word must be used again, because this one smells good of prog too. The band is a bit ironic, calling track number 6 "Prognissekongen", meaning "The king of the prog gnomes" in Norwegian. Lars Horntveth tells National Post (23 January): "There's six or seven time changes in that song, and it's almost impossible to play the piano and guitar stuff. But then of course, we don't want to make wanky progrock music; we want to make catchy music".
You will be able to find traces of other influences too, and Patrick Lindgren in the Swedish paper Göteborgsposten (27 January) claims that he can hear "influences like Steve Reich, Soft Machine/Robert Wyatt, Tortoise and Squarepusher" (and let´s list Phillip Glass and Terry Riley too), but to be honest they just sound like Jaga Jazzist.
I listened to the previous albums "A livingroom hush" (2001), "The Stix" (2002) and "What we must" (2005) earlier this evening, to freshen up my memory, and the conclusion is they are all different, they all sound like Jaga Jazzist and I recommend all of them too. "One-armed bandit" just might be the best place to start.
The Molde International Jazz Festival and the Øya Festival (Oslo) have played major parts in financing this nice album.

On Jaga Jazzist´s site they list these musicians as band members:
Mathias Eick – Trumpet, upright bass, keyboards + vibraphone
Marcus Forsgren – Guitars + effects
Even Ormestad – Bass + keyboards
Andreas Mjøs – Vibraphone, guitars, drums + electronics
Line Horntveth – Tuba + percussion
Martin Horntveth – Drums + drum-machines
Lars Horntveth – Tenor sax, bass-clarinet, guitars + keyboards
Øystein Moen – Keyboards
Erik Johannessen - Trombone + percussion
I throw in guitar wizard Stian Westerhus too for good measure.

Coverdesign: Yokoland.

If you collect The Thing, you just have to buy "One-armed bandit". They open the album with a 23 seconds long intro, before the fantastic title track starts rolling.