Austin Escorts: Interview with Ingebrigt Haker Flaten of Free Fall
Oh yes, great players. Garbarek was sort of a copycat, but he could do anything – play like Dexter Gordon, Sonny Rollins, Albert Ayler. It was an amazing time, and I love that stuff George Russell (who lived in Norway for a while) composed. He was a friend of one of my inspirations, [bassist] Bjørnar Andresen. Before Andresen died, we hung out together. He was an interesting link to an underground scene in Norway that isn’t well-known. A lot of younger players today are beginning to be informed by that.
We were talking about this placement of jazz up on a pedestal, a sort of reverence. I was talking with the baritone saxophonist Hamiet Bluiett, and his belief was that “they took the brothel out of it, and they need to put it back in.” The whoring, the dirt – even in free music, musicians get into a rarified appreciation of it as a spiritual, criticism-free endeavor. It gets very tiring, and it’s great to hear people tear shit up and allow the music to be about what they want it to be about.
See the full article from “Austinist”