An Interview with Bassist Ingebrigt Håker Flaten

[This interview first appeared in Austinist, 2010] Norwegian bassist Ingebrigt Håker Flaten is one of the busiest contemporary practitioners on the instrument; he first came to prominence in The Thing with reedist Mats Gustafsson and bassist Paal Nilssen-Love, and has also held down the bull fiddle in cooperative units like Free Fall, Atomic, Icepick, Scorch Trio, and in groups with Joe McPhee, Ken Vandermark, Mars Williams, Michio Yagi, and Henry Kaiser. Since his 2009 relocation to Austin, Texas, he has led the Texas-centric Young Mothers with saxophonist Jason Jackson, trumpeter-rapper Jawwaad Taylor, guitarist Jonathan Horne, and percussionists Frank Rosaly and Stefan González, and contributed to the local scene as a concert organizer and tireless collaborator. This interview was conducted shortly after his relocation and to promote a concert by Free Fall, organized by Epistrophy Arts.

Photo copyright Peter Gannushkin/downtownmusic.net

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So, first of all, can you explain why you have settled in Austin?

It’s simple – we relocated to Norway, my wife (or soon-to-be) and I, from January to June 2009 and realized that first of all, it’s too expensive and there are also other practical reasons. Immigration and work for her, school for her daughter and so forth – it’s simpler to rethink everything and move back here, because her family is from Texas. We like Austin much better than Houston as a place to live, so that’s basically it. I have an artist’s visa that runs out in July; I’ve been fine traveling back and forth and haven’t had problems, so when we get married I can renew it. It’s easier and cheaper for me to be in the States and travel back and forth to Europe than it would be living in Norway. The cost of living is over the top.

You were living in Chicago before coming to Texas, right?

Yes, two and a half, almost three years.

Was living in the United States part of the plan before you began spending time in Chicago?

Sort of – I’d always been curious about the scenes in the States. Even if you know about its surface, you don’t know about the underground and how that works. I knew a little bit about Chicago because I had an ongoing project with [reedman/composer] Ken Vandermark, and soon there became an opportunity to relocate to Chicago, and I’m really happy that I did. The Chicago scene is very vibrant and community-oriented, and it was very inspiring.

I heard some bubbling about an arts organization here that you may be involved with.

My wife and I are thinking about starting something together; everything isn’t clear, but the Free Fall show is the beginning of a collaboration between Pedro Moreno (of Epistrophy Arts) and us. We really want to get something together for presenting music here. My experience and networks with the European scene will help, and she has worked on presenting music in Houston [with Nameless Sound]. I can’t really get more specific right now, but I think it’s something that will be really interesting to work off of.

There’s also the proximity to Mexico, and [drummer] Chris Cogburn is connected to that – something which a lot of people don’t know about.

We are thinking about that too, linking up to Mexico a bit. I played with [saxophonist] Remi Alvarez at the No Idea Festival, with [Dallas-based drummer] Stefan Gonzalez, and hopefully we’ll go down to Mexico City and do something with him again. There’s a lot of really interesting stuff there, but they don’t have much money to assemble things or get the music out of Mexico. You have to visit in order to experience it. I’m really curious and excited about seeing if that’s something we can start getting involved with.

I know it’s early to tell, but how do you feel jumping into the music scene here, especially as it hasn’t always been friendly to improvisers? Of course, Chicago has so much, but there just isn’t quite the level of awareness in Austin.

Yeah, it’s interesting. I think Chicago is a rare and strong community, but there is a lot of potential here. When you promote music, people come out, and that’s great.

I was amazed to see the turnout at the Frøde Gjerstad show on a cold Tuesday night. Something must be clicking.

It’s exciting to see what we can do in presenting music here. I’m really happy to be trying that out. I just played with a few people – [saxophonist-composer] Carl Smith, [trumpeter] Derek Phelps, we just did a session. It’s cool to play with these guys and, you know, as soon as you start, it might not be much, but people will become aware of it and come out.

The idea of connecting Austin to an international scene – Texas is very insular in a lot of ways, so cultivating a scene where it isn’t just about Texas but a whole greater thing out there is important. It’s easy to lose sight of, but bringing in Mats [Gustafsson, saxophonist] and Paal [Nilssen-Love, drummer] and Håvard [Wiik, pianist] is something rare and quite special. In places like New York, you get a little more exposure to international musicians, but it’s still not a huge amount.

It’s hard to get into New York, logistically, so many musicians fighting for the same pieces.

Maybe it will be easier here?

Yes, definitely! I would think so, and it’s closer to Chicago and New York living here (rather than Oslo). I can keep things going elsewhere, and it plays into being located in Austin. I would like to bring people into the circuit with Houston, San Antonio and Dallas. There could be tours or something like that, and a lot of people from other places haven’t even been to Texas. They have a lot of preconceptions about what it’s like, and that’s fascinating.

I had no idea what to expect when I moved down here. It’s funny – there’s a festival in Minneapolis called Minnesota Sur Seine, because Jean Rochard from Nato Records in Paris married a woman in Minneapolis. He had the idea to bring French jazz musicians like Michel Portal and Francois Tusques over to play with local improvisers. It was really fascinating and surprising, because I’d never heard of anything like that. It’s great. 

So the primary musical projects you’re working on now are Free Fall and Atomic. Where is The Thing in your trajectory?

Oh, that band still has a lot of activity coming up. We have basically the next two years planned out.

How, in your mind, did The Thing come together? I had forgotten that you guys have been a band for about ten years now.

I think it started around the same time as Atomic, around 1999 or 2000. It was a lot of coincidences; Mats and Paal knew each other but hadn’t played together, and at the time I was playing in this beat-oriented new jazz group. Mats heard me play and we clicked, and he brought me into The Thing. I recruited Paal and that was it. At first it was a recording project doing Don Cherry’s music, and it clicked so well that we decided to keep on playing together.

With The Thing’s take on jazz and rock, it’s interesting to see where those things meet. Yet there’s an aggressiveness to it that is pretty far from the “normal” canvas of improvised music. How did that “loud/fast” aesthetic come into play?

Well, I think we have as much interest and basis in rock music as we do in jazz, and we are all of the age where jazz is as old as anything else. Rock music is probably closer to us in many ways – it was the first music I heard, and that probably goes for all three of us. For myself, I do feel that I am a jazz musician. That’s where I started studying and dealing with music for real, where I got my spirits lifted. It means a lot to me and I try to project that when I’m playing. Mats brought in some punk covers for the third record, Garage, and we decided to approach it all in the same way as Don Cherry, Frank Wright or other compositions. We try to use it as we do “jazz” music, and it kind of escalated into something bigger.

It’s often the case that because someone does a lot of different projects, one expects them to automatically inform one another – which they don’t always do. Still, hearing the Thing, which is very dense and out-front music, using noise elements, to Free Fall’s chamber-jazz, to Atomic as a sort of wild Tristano-school bebop. They are all very different. Could you talk about your approach to the instrument across all these contexts?

That’s one of the inspiring things, to keep a number of bands going with a lot of the different things that I like in music. You realize you can’t put everything in one band; a lot of my groups have been working bands for years, and you define things along the way as you record and tour. It really doesn’t feel like I have to divide my brain; it’s different aspects of the same thing and it’s very inspiring to focus on one thing with a certain approach, then move to another project with a different frame of mind. All of these bands have immediate, spontaneous improvisation and whether it’s more composed music or very free, that immediacy is part of it. Keeping it fresh and interesting, that’s always the goal.

Did you start off playing electric bass or upright?

I started off with an electric in choir in my hometown, and that was kind of my first experience. I listened to Jaco Pastorius and that stuff, then wanted to learn more and got into school for the double bass. I left the electric bass for years until very recently, when I began to play it again.

Could you talk a bit more about your formative years in studying music, and how you got interested in it?

Me, Paal and Håvard – a lot of things in Norway started with us when we met in 1992 or 1993. I was a student at the jazz academy in Trondheim, and they started a year or two afterwards. We got together in a band called Elements, with a saxophonist who was kind of a Coltrane fanatic. We rehearsed a lot together, trying to get it right even if we had no idea what “it” was – just playing a LOT. Paal’s family had been presenting music for years, so he was close to jazz from when he was a kid – it was ingrained. Håvard had also been listening to jazz quite a lot. It just exploded when we met, and the Trondheim community allowed us to meet and play with people so that I began touring almost immediately. It escalated and we did a lot of playing in Europe with different bands. When I was invited to play with Mats in the AALY Trio, they needed a sub for their bass player (Peter Janson) when they came to the US in 1999, so that was my first time playing in the States. At that time I also made a record with [saxophonist] Dave Liebman, and I was able to meet people in the Chicago scene, see people like Hamid Drake play, and experience the cooperation of that environment. 

It seems like a snowball effect, where everything came together at once.

Yes, it seems sometimes like it’s out of your hands. Things happened, people were available and excited, and that was really all it was.

I get the impression that Norway has a pretty fertile scene as well.

A big reason for Norway’s visibility is that there is a jazz school in Trondheim, and another school in Oslo. It’s kind of crazy to think about educating and graduating all these jazz musicians every year. It’s a great place to meet people; you have to know a bit before you attend school, but once you are in, you are really free to explore and do what you want. You’re not set to learn how to play bebop or certain other aesthetics. That’s not the case in a lot of institutions – they tell you what to do, and that’s really not what this music is about.

Yes, in the United States it’s different. I have friends who have gone through jazz programs in the US and tried to reject what they’ve been taught immediately after finishing. University of North Texas, for example – it’s about rigorous adherence to specific approaches that, while good, they aren’t what everything should be.

Exactly – I think it’s the nature of people in their early twenties to be narrow-minded and focused, and you should do that. In the same way, teachers must be responsible to expose students to other methods. For example, I love Paul Chambers’ bass playing and his sound – he’s one of my heroes – but to be stuck in that way of playing would be very small-minded. A lot of people seem to be interested in making sure that jazz is a classical art form (such as the Marsalises), but I’m not sure that that’s what jazz is about. Again, going back to my experience in school, we were exposed to a lot of other ways of playing the music and learned how to do those things. Maybe because it was an isolated area up north, not too many musicians came through on tour. Sweden, on the other hand, had people like Don Cherry and Dexter Gordon living there. They defined the scene, whereas we had to do it ourselves – so maybe it was fortunate that we were a little bit isolated. 

What I think of in terms of Norwegian jazz – Terje Rypdal, Jan Garbarek – 

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 with George Russell (who lived in Norway for a while), and he was a friend of one of my inspirations, [bassist] Bjørnar Andresen. Before Andresen died, we hung together a lot. 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 fuck shit up and allow the music to be about what they want it to be about.

Look at [saxophonist/cornetist] Joe McPhee, his age and history, and what he’s a part of. He’s still searching and openly checking out whatever he finds interesting. He’s been part of the history on so many levels, and he doesn’t care about putting it in a certain place socially.

And he was ignored for so long, too. So what are some of the other things you’re working on now? We talked about The Thing, Atomic and Free Fall as being the center of your musical activities, and perhaps toward getting something going here in Austin. What else is in the pipeline? I know that’s a lot to fill your schedule!

I just finished recording some new material with the Scorch Trio; Paal quit and is no longer the drummer, so Frank Rosaly from Chicago is now in the group. We’re really happy about the recording, so hopefully it will be released this spring. It changes the dynamic – Paal isn’t an easy drummer to replace, so we’ll see what happens. But I like Frank’s playing and he has a lot of big ideas about approaching the drums, so that’s really exciting. I got a call from [saxophonist] Tony Malaby to join his trio with [drummer] Nasheet Waits, so I’ll be in for William Parker. I’m super excited about that, and I really love playing with those guys. I’d like to get more into the New York scene as well, but the logistics have to be worked out. And there are things in Chicago that I’m still a part of, like the Dave Rempis Percussion Quartet.

You joined that group recently.

Yeah, I went with them on a European tour in May, and that was the start of it. I just recorded with them in February. All of these are things I want to do more of – but of course there’s very little money in it! [laughs]

It’s a bit better in Europe for arts funding.

Well, yes, somewhat. It’s a whole different world – the Norwegian government supports art and music and a whole lot of things. It’s not necessarily all good, though, because if you have a lot of funding for these things you can get lazy with your ideas. There are two sides to everything. If you are aware that it won’t be like this forever – for example, the government in Norway is changing to a more conservative view – but for now, it’s good, and there are opportunities to get the money to do interesting things. That is a big difference from a lot of places right now. 

You would think there would be a lot more organizations in the US who would be talking to European governments and artists to get things happening.

A lot of those things cover just the surface of a scene – what most Norwegians know about the American scene is really just the musicians on big labels being flown over. And it’s the same the other way, I guess. We really need something that covers the real shit that’s happening.

And that brings us full circle, to the potential of Austin.

Yeah, I hope so – everybody knows about SXSW, and you would think that something would be possible around that. Pedro and I have talked about doing something during SXSW in the future, so we’ll see.

Getting back to some of your projects, are you still composing much?

I had a quintet in Norway and one in Chicago, and I’d like to pick writing up again. It’s a big focus for me, but I’ve been out of reach with that because of very intense factors in other areas. I use people where I’m located. But I have to be clear about it, and I don’t want composing to be something that I “have” to do. 

It’s been inspiring to have a band, but it’s a lot of work – it’s hard to be a bandleader sometimes. You have to make sure that people feel free and not limited by the music; the compositions should lead the way to a player’s open mind, and that is a challenge. Then again, you have to find people to write for, administrate and so forth. At the moment I’m doing that for Atomic, and there aren’t enough hours in the day for all of it.

It’s good to hear somebody say that they won’t just fill up space by writing tunes – if you aren’t in the right frame of mind or around the right people, it won’t happen. I never get the feeling that on a recording that you make, that you’re just a sideman – it’s not like you are a stand-in bassist, and you bring something compositional to the proceedings. One hears a fair amount of musicians who are there to be paid whether they are quality players or not. But I feel like you are on a record because you want to be there, and that helps to structure the music.

Thanks – I hope so! One aspect is that I am a terrible sight reader, so I can’t just jump in and do a session. I have to look at the music before and learn it before I can even approach it how I want. Some people get calls every day to make sessions, and that’s just not how I work. I want to do things in the best possible way. In New York, you have to be able to make sessions to be a musician and survive, unless you have a day job. That’s why I wouldn’t be so eager to do that every day – you have to compromise a lot. You wouldn’t always be able to think about what you really want to do. 

You’re able to have music as your income, though.

I am fortunate enough to be able to do that. I have to travel back and forth all the time, of course. But I always think that if the situation came where it was only a paycheck, I would rather have a different job – I can’t use music for that.