SULIDA - AXEL DÖRNER - Etiwe

A fortuitous but passionate encounter, that between the Norwegian trio Sulida (Dag Erik Knedal Andersen, Jon Rune Strøm, Marthe Lea) and German trumpeter Axel Dörner. The stage is that of the 2025 Kongsberg Jazz Festival. Sulida are on the bill thanks to the success of their 2024 debut album on Clean Feed, “Utos”. Veteran Axel Dörner is a regular guest at the German showcase.
Together the four musicians conjure up a red-hot evening, where improvisation and composition mix and merge into a sound forever searching for the balance between substance and silence. The concert, recorded live, becomes an album, “Etiwe”, which in just forty minutes evokes the stormy mood of that night.

“Conversation”, which opens the tracklist, immediately reveals the free nature of the event, with the horns chirping over the liquid groove laid down by double bass and drums. Lea's tenor and Dörner's trumpet seek each other out, challenge one another and overlap in an inextricable labyrinth. The music is physical and unpredictable, capable of shifting from the most abstract tension to sudden nods to folk tradition.
With the ten-plus minutes of “Drop”, the quartet pushes well beyond the boundaries of traditional jazz grammar. The sound becomes abstract, phrases go unfinished, and the silences weigh like boulders. Melody takes centre stage again on the third track, the shortest on the record at just over five minutes: “Psalm: Topos 2” feels almost like a pagan prayer, an ancestral rite, a place where the spirit can rest. The lengthy “Etiwe”, at nearly fifteen minutes, closes the album in the best possible way: a manifesto in which all four protagonists lay out their views on the past, present and future of jazz.

“Etiwe” is a tribute to the improvisation of the best free jazz of the 1960s and at the same time a window onto the visions of the new generations.

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29/09/2026