Earthling makes its world premiere Sunday, March 14 at 11:30am at the Alamo Ritz 1. It’s also showing Monday, March 15 at 7:00pm at the Alamo Lamar 3, and Thursday, March 18 at 7:00 PM at ACC. For the full schedule, see my.SXSW or B-Side.

Congrats to today's winners:

Steph Douglass
David Lawrence

We'll be contacting you shortly about picking up your badges.

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 [reedman] 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, Paal, and Håvard 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 [reedman] Michel Portal and [pianist] 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 (Smalltown Superjazz, 2004), 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 started to escalate 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 - [guitarist] Terje Rypdal, [saxophonist] 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 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.

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!

Free Fall: Wiik, Flaten, Vandermark.

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 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.

Image from The Happen-Ins’ MySpace, by Alexandra Valenti

The Happen-Ins came together in early 2009. Ray Jackson had just split from his own band, Lomita and was playing pedal steel with Brothers and Sisters. John Mike had been touring for several years with a number of Billboard country acts like Ryan Bingham, Jack Ingram, and Miranda Lambert. Really, all of us had spent years playing together in one band or another. John Michael and I played in the Dedringers together where they encountered Falcon, a former Harlem Spiritual Orchestra member, who filled in on a last minute gig where the usual drummer had run into car trouble. Ricky Ray and John Mike also toured extensively together backing Americana artist Hayes Carll who they currently play the occasional gig with. Following the split of the Dedringers and while Carll had some downtime, we found ourselves sitting on a wealth of mutual admiration for each other and an opportunity to make music together.

What is right and wrong about the music scene in Austin right now?

Attitude. The average Austin venue treats the average Austin band with about as much respect as a common housefly. Simple availability for communication between the two parties is scarce. There are a ton of bands that play great shows with full rooms but never see a dime or even speak with a representative of the venue. I think a lot of it has to do with venues taking advantage of local bands who don't know any better. There are so many of these Tom Sawyer venues who convince bands to whitewash their fences and then sit back and take money off the band pay for "promotion" and what-not. It’s a totally fair practice if the venue actually spent any money to promote. A venue with an in house promoter who doesn't even put a simple tweet up regarding the new teenage indie band playing that night still takes out a chunk. How can those kids ever develop? Bands aren't learning how to survive here. It’s for this reason that we are so glad that there are venues starting to pop up that are willing to communicate and work with the band to make ANY show worthwhile everyone involved. Places like the Scoot Inn and Club 1808 are always eager to hear you out and work with you to make sure everyone gets something and that the shows are actually promoted.

Image from The Happen-Ins’ MySpace, by Alexandra Valenti

It’s always a long-shot that your new band will get noticed in a scene like Austin's. I think it's most important for bands not to worry about anything else but their songs and their performance. If you've got great songs and real passion and sincerity, people will give their attention. In a place so saturated like Austin, it’s so important to try and create your own scene. With The Happen-Ins, we started out from day one knowing that we wanted to develop our own culture and build a community amongst ourselves and our audience. I think that is one of the keys to success in today’s climate, with record labels dying is that DIY approach. Some of our best shows have been house parties and places like the Scoot or 1808 because we were able to come in and dominate our environment. We really try to push our audience to move and become involved at the shows with us and with each other. It's the sense of community at our shows I think that makes people comfortable enough to actually dance and approach others.

It's more transparent on a bigger level for example with the Psych scene in town. They did a great job in creating a scene around themselves and that has lead to some of the success stories from those circles.

What are your plans for SXSW? What tips would you offer both residents in the city, and visitors, on how to make SXSW an unforgettable experience?

We're just like everybody else as far as SXSW goes -- we'll be working hard and just trying to survive the week. It really is a great opportunity to meet a lot of bands and build up some community so we're looking forward to playing with and hearing bands that bring something new and interesting. We've got a super busy Saturday (20th) with three shows, including a late night show at the Gibson Showroom, a gig at the United States Art Authority earlier in the evening and a helloooooo.com day party. We are also doing a spot at Jo's on South Congress during the week but haven't got the schedule yet.

The best advice we could give for anyone planning to attend the conference would definitely be to keep your eyes and ears open. There are so many parties and events, it’s tough to decide where to be and when and a lot of finding a good time comes down to luck.

All the best for SXSW and thank you for speaking with Austinist.

[The Happen-Ins MySpace]
[A Giant Dog MySpace]
[Nic Armstrong MySpace]
[The Ripe MySpace]

So what if it’s not some important (boring) Michael Moore doc that’s supposed to change the way we see our government? This one looks like fun! And if you’re like us, you have quite a few opinions you’ve never had the chance to share, and it will be nice to see someone sharing them for you. Maybe you can even start preparing a rant of your own for the sequel, in case it ever goes to a higher court.

The People vs. George Lucas screens Saturday March 13 at 6:30 PM at the Alamo South Lamar. It will also be shown Tuesday March 16 at 1:45 PM at the Alamo South Lamar, and at 3:30 PM on Thursday March 18 at the Paramount. For the full schedule, see my.SXSW or B-Side.

The Weird World of Blowfly plays Saturday, March 13th at 9:30 PM at the Alamo South Lamar 3, Wednesday, Mar 17th at 4:30pm in the G-Tech Theater at the Austin Convention Center, and Friday, Mar 19th at 9:00pm at Alamo South Lamar 2. For the full schedule, see my.SXSW or B-Side.