My good friend BK is moving to Oslo. I am leaving the bookshop job that I do on Sundays. People are breaking up and getting together and all sorts. It’s all change and I feel sad and emboldened.

I try to persuade friends along to last night’s show with a text message that promised NORWEGIAN JAZZ AT BARDENS! I HAVE PLUS ONE! To my surprise, there’s no reply. See, I don’t know until about an hour before I got there that it’s actually a Four Tet and Prefuse 73 show that I was inviting them to; perhaps I should have said that in the text, huh? Although my wife emails me this morning to ask how the ‘noodling electronic boiz’ had been, and to tell me that she thought Four Tet were “horrible middle aged music for fat middle aged indie boys.” She oughta know, she has been borrowing his new album off me for weeks.

So anyway, ignorant of the sold-out noodling boiz show to which I’m actually going, I hurry off to see The Thing, who provide me with an 30 minute or so blast of undulating, parping, stomping ecstasy among the polite breakbeats of the rest of the evening. Last time I saw them was in Oslo, at Bla (can’t find the accent for the a, sorry), and for some reason I watched their whole set from behind, or at least almost behind. I think it was really crowded and we wanted to sit down and the only place was a flight of stairs just behind the stage. So I got to see their backs. Watching musicians from the wrong angle is strangely fascinating. Drummers from behind look especially odd, bouncing around on their seats and jiggling their legs, and when that drummer is Paal Nilssen-Love, energetic and rangy and nuts and quite wonderful, it looks even funnier.

Tonight, though, I squirm to the front and stand about 2 feet away from the band and let them move me to joyful, silly dancing. You can dance to jazz, not just when it gets all chuggy on those covers of Art Star and Have Love Will Travel. You just have to find a thread and follow it, and not care how you look. As I get older, happier and more confused, this bothers me less. Flick of the wrists, shake of the shoulders, don’t care if youthful quirkiness gives way to crinkly-eyed eccentricity, don’t care who sees me smile.

{{popup Mats.JPG Mats 392×628}}Mats Gustaffson, by way of introduction, says drily that he and his band are going to teach us about jazz music, or something like that; a piece of Nordic irony that isn’t really necessary, given Four Tet’s much-trumpeted love of all things jazz (and, one presumes, his fans’ heeding of his advice). But while you know that The Thing’s their fun project, the place where they go for it and have fun and burst a few blood vessels playing those crazy garage tracks, still, amid the indie rock that precedes them and the electronica that follows, they sound truly out there, raw and vital: more future that Prefuse and more farout than Four Tet.

Between the garage stompers and the more free pieces there are these bravura solo bits that could, frankly, sound like a load of wank, but somehow don’t. {{popup ingebrigt.JPG ingebrigt 480×640}}Ingebrigt Haker Flaten, on double bass, pulls the idea of the solo away from showing off and into this weird realm of demeted possession, scraping his bow right up against the bridge of the bass, fingers reaching as far as they’ll go as if he’s trying to pull sound from the very bottom of a great well. {{popup Paal.JPG Paal 529×455}}Paal Nilssen-Love is more showy, but even he channels an intensity into his solo passages that make you afeared even as they make you laugh. And the sheer volume of Gustafsson’s saxes (he alternates between tenor and baritone) is hilariously earth-shaking; and don’t you love it when the look of effort and vein-popping RRAARRRGHHHH on a musician’s face is actually comparable to the sound they’re making? I do. It doesn’t happen much.