Frode Gjerstad and Derek Baily

Nearly a D (Emanem)

Frode Gjerstad, John Stevens and Derek Bailey

Hello Goodbye (Emanem)

Born in Stavanger, Norway, in 1948, the saxophonist Frode Gjerstad spent his youth in the teeth of bitter coastal winds and I often wonder how deep they still blow through his horns, even within the midst of the hottest improvised music.

Gjerstad recalls: "There were only about 50,000 people living in Stavanger and the cultural life was mostly the theatre and the orchestra, plus the occasional concert.

"If you wanted to get into something, you really had to search for it."

After discovering jazz on the family radio, in particular the "incredible" flute-playing - "it sounded like a bird" - of Eric Dolphy, he had found that something.

He heard the saxophones of Ornette Coleman, Albert Ayler and Jimmy Lyons across the airwaves, and was transfixed by a photograph of Ayler on the front cover of the first Downbeat magazine that he ever bought.

In 1968 he bought a saxophone and began to make up for lost music while working as a social science teacher.

In 1979 he met the British free drummer John Stevens on a visit to London, and two years later telephoned him from Norway, inviting him for a joint gig.

Stevens came and Gjerstad's life changed.

The drummer contacted the South African ex-Blue Note bassist Johnny Dyani and they formed the trio Detail, which soon gained international exposure - including a British tour with US trumpeter Bobby Bradford and the cutting of a series of fine albums.

Gjerstad and Stevens remained close confreres and collaborators right up to the drummer's death in 1994.

Gjerstad vividly remembers one particular session at Stevens's regular haunt The Plough pub in Stockwell, with Dyani and Bradford.

"We played very well that night," he remembers. "It was the last gig with Dyani and the last time I saw him.

"The place was completely packed and we had a good audience. And it was very damp - my jeans were wet after we ended."

That's what it was like - The Plough in a nutshell.

Memories of the wonderfully magnetic and formidable Stevens are certainly stirred on the 1992 Emanem album Hello Goodbye when he and Gjerstad formed a trio with the Sheffield guitarist Derek Bailey at a Stavanger date.

An unlikely enough threesome - London, Sheffield and Stavanger, and a long, long way from New Orleans.

But jazz is the sound of surprise from the most unusual and bizarre combinations and unities. And how they play, this trio on the watery edge of Norway. Free, united, musically brave and starkly original.

"It was one long workshop lasting 13 years," Gjerstad said of his time with Stevens.

And Hello Goodbye has that immediate and completely spontaneous ambiance from the very first sounds of the opener Hello.

There is Gjerstad's own alto saxophone birdsong, angular and piercing, sometimes terse, other times mollifying. Stevens's scuttling, rebellious drums and Bailey's raking, plucking strings, full of echo and vibrato, his city's steelworks epitomised in every harrowing note.

Listen to their amalgam of sounds on the astonishing Three Two Three Two One - such a fusion of blatant differences for 21 naked minutes, completed by what must be the longest recorded note in jazz, only to be overtaken by the 24 minutes of Three By Three, where Gjerstad warbles extravagantly and sometimes hurriedly, Bailey itches and scratches his strings beside Stevens's relentless cymbalism.

With Stevens gone eight years before, Gjerstad and Bailey met again as a duo in Bailey's Hackney flat in 2002, and Nearly a D was the recorded result.

The opener Bells has some chinking rhapsody from Bailey while Gjerstad blows a piercing clarinet at its topmost reaches.

At one point Bailey's string cadences sound as if he is falling down a long staircase, so urgent are his notes.

"We do not have solos in our music, only two or three people playing," declared Gjerstad. It's just a few unaccompanied guitar notes at the outset of A Cup Of Tea and then it's an intense, empathetic unceasing drink of togetherness all the way through until Bailey exclaims: "Let's have a cup of tea then!" Well, they deserved it.

Since Nearly a D Gjerstad has made a succession of fine albums with US musicians, in a trio with arch-bassist William Parker and drummer Hamid Drake, and with the Brooklyn vibes and drums of Kevin Norton.

And as for the free jazz improvisation they all play, he says: "The fact that more and more of the commercial music is created in such a way that all spontaneity is lost and the end product is very often extremely boring and slick, will maybe lead to more interest in this music because it is the opposite." Amen to that.