Scandinavia

Start with the anomaly: a small, cold, oil-rich country deciding, decades ago, that improvising musicians deserved salaries. Norway's state arts funding and regional conservatories produced more working jazz players per capita than almost anywhere, and the export version of that sound — Garbarek's stately, reverb-heavy saxophone on ECM — taught the world to hear Nordic jazz as weather: cool, spacious, patient.

The domestic labels inherited it. Rune Grammofon, running since the late nineties, gave Norwegian improvisers a home that numbered its catalog like a library and hired designers (Yokoland, Kim Hiorthøy) instead of using band photos. Hubro, since 2009, narrowed the focus to what it calls the vital Norwegian jazz and improvised music scene — mostly Oslo, mostly players who circulate through each other's records. We Jazz does the same job in Helsinki with a magazine and festival attached. None of these labels will ever have a hit; that's not the business. The business is a documented, continuing scene.

The current crop sounds like what it is: conservatory chops with no need to prove them, song-forms borrowed from pop and folk, dynamics borrowed from post-rock, and the hardanger fiddle — Apneseth's instrument, with its sympathetic strings that hum under what you play — carrying a folk tradition into rooms it was never built for. Hauge writes in a døgnville state, out of synch with time; Kallevåg plays blues shaped by the western coast; Eriksen writes hymns you could hum. Urheim's record is the control experiment: same sensibility, outside players booked on purpose, Mori's electronics and Gendel's saxophone instead of the usual Oslo names.

Stockholm sends Det enda bl.a., part post-rock, part jazz, debut out October 24 — evidence the sensibility travels. Two archive picks reach outside the story entirely, as they should: Spheroe's 1972 Lyon jazz-rock and Neil Ardley's 1976 British orchestral jazz, both back in print this year.