The Norwegian Wood festival in Oslo has a pretty impressive line-up this year – as usual. The first night Bryan Ferry was the headliner with a 12 man band, and yesterday night Lenny Kravitz played before the greates of them all, Tom Pretty & The Heartbreakers. Since Kravitz presented an unacceptable photo contract, I took no pictures of him. But Tom Petty had no contract, and did a great show for a sold out festival.
The Working Class Hero festival in Drammen has established itself as a quality festival, even if it isn’t the biggest one in Norway. Each year they have some really great artists on the program. This year Susanne Sundfoer is one of them, and she opened the Friday night at the main stage. Here are some pictures from the concert.
The Prince of Darkness, Ozzy Osbourne, is on a road with what was supposed to be a Black Sabbath tour. But Tony Iommi’s illness prevented this, and instead Ozzy invited some friends to join him on the tour. In Oslo we were allowed to photograph him with two of them, Slash and Zakk Wylde. Here are pictures from the concert at Oslo Spektrum.
Kent is maybe the biggest band in Sweden, but relatively unknown outside of Scandinavia. They have played together for more than 20 yars, and have released 10 CDs. Their latest CD called Jag är inte rädd för mörkret (I Am Not Afraid Of The Dark), was released in April. Friday May 24th they played for a sold out house at the Rockefeller Music Hall in Oslo.
An article in Norwegian this time, unfortunately not translated. This is an article I wrote for the historic society in my hometown, Sauda, about the local rock bands in the late 60s. The article was published in the Sauda historic society’s yearbook for 2010.
In February this year I saw Satyricon with the National Opera Choir performing To The Mountains at Norway’s National Opera House. The performance was part of a conference arranged by the Opera and the Olympiatoppen, an organisation set up to train Norwegian elite sport.
Lucky Lips are a Norwegian bluegrass band consisting of five excellent musicians. Each of them are really competent on their instruments, but together they shine. Wednesday night they played a release concert for their new CD Mountain Dust.
I was reminded of this concert from 2009 when Levon Helm died last month. Garth Hudson played with Levon Helm in The Band for many years and – like Levon Helm – his playing was an important part of The Band’s distinguished sound. I never saw Levon Helm play, but in 2009 I saw Garth Hudson in concert with Jeffrey & The Free Radicals.
Trondheim Jazz Festival is coming up next weekend, and here are some pictures from the 2010 festival, of one of my all time favourite bands from the 70’s and 80’s, the Manhattan Transfer.
The Norwegian band Hot Club de Norvège started in 1979 and is till going strong as Norway’s leading band in their style. Touché is a new band who has taken upon them to give Hot Club de Norvège some competition. Friday night they played together at a double concert in Oslo, and the audience got the chance to see both the veterans and the new generation of Norwegian hot club bands.
Artist Pictures Blog 