ABSTRACT
Chapter 4 highlights the role of an electronic jazz record label based in Oslo, Jazzland Recordings, which gained a coveted reputation since the early 2000s within Northern Europe. The chapter examines particularly to what extent this record label offered a ‘New Conception of Jazz’ by embracing and recording those artists willing to engage with and update the widely celebrated ‘Nordic tone’ aesthetic, while also exploring especially broader global cosmopolitan movements, including electronic dance and world music. Furthermore, it explores to what extent Norway, as a well-financed, social welfare state, has nurtured the careers of contemporary jazz artists, breaking the conservative mould dominant across the Atlantic in the 1990s. Consequently, it looks at the spaces and organisation of neighbourhoods within Oslo during an intense period of urbanisation and regeneration followed by the competitive incursion of capital within jazz spaces through industrial and economic processes of neoliberalism. Here two artists, Bugge Wesseltoft and Beady Belle, and their Jazzland Recordings, produced over two decades, are examined to delineate the transformation from more locally based but transnationally driven jazz scenes to transnational networks of performance and promotion.
