Sweden have a great tradition of artists who are both poets and composers, plus great live artists. Ulf Lundell, Stefan Sundström, the late Cornelis Vreswijk, and these days Lars Winnerbäck. This Sunday he played at the Norwegian Wood festival in Oslo to a sold out venue.
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.
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.
Wednesday night Metallica are playing in Oslo, at Valle Hovin. They played in Oslo in 2009 and 2010, and I had the good fortune of photographing both events, plus when they played the SXSW in Austin in March 2009. Here are some of the pictures from those two concerts to shorten the wait for those who have tickets for the Valle Hovin event.
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.
Austin band Deadman has a name that implies a former existence. That is not far from the truth, since this is the second incarnation of the band. They started out in Dallas, but front man Steven Collins moved down to Austin and restarted the band when the first version broke up. Yesterday they played at Buckley’s in Oslo, Norway.
Tsjuder is one of the oldest Norwegian black metal bands, being formed in 1993. They have been off and on for the last 19 years, with different members, but reformed a couple of years ago. Friday night they played at Rockefeller Music Hall during the Inferno festival.
There are many excellent female musicians in Texas, and on Thursday March 22nd, some of these were gathered at Antone’s to celebrate the birthdays of Marcia Ball, Nancy Kaplan and Nancy Fly. The concert was also done in the spirit of Etta James.
Alejandro Escovedo is one of the musical jewels of Austin. At the Austin Music Awards show, he was the closing act, and he brought many of his musical friends with him on stage. Among them Bruce Springsteen, Joe Ely, Dan Dyer and Garland Jeffreys.
Artist Pictures Blog 
