It’s in his blood, in his muscles, in his genes, this drumming thing. It runs in Gard Nilssen’s family. The instrument has never been alien to him, so it is only natural that he would take it up as an extension of his ideas and invest in jazz with methods and languages in the lineage of Norwegian jazz since the mid-1990s. Over the last decade and a few peaks he has been in charge of projects like Bushman’s Revenge, sPacemonKey, Amgala Temple, Ruby and Gard Nilssen Supersonic Orchestra, creating music that doesn’t always go along with jazz but always circles around it. Gard Nilssen Acoustic Unity was born precisely from the insatiable will to constantly search for new dynamics and textures in the sound they create.

A never ending search, one might say, for a musician who plays live, on average, more than two hundred shows a year, who has recorded more than seventy records and has an enviable list of musicians with whom he has collaborated/played. Gard Nilssen Acoustic Unity began to develop in the middle of the last decade and materialized into an album in 2019, with “To Whom Who Buys A Record” (ODIN), which will be presented for the first time in Portugal at ZDB. André Roligheten (saxophone, clarinet), Petter Eldh (double bass) and Gard Nilssen (drums) create music in constant movement, insisting on finding ways for each to create new existences on their instruments.

“To Whom Who Buys A Record” sounds, at times, like a jazz-providential album, with the musicians in a looped dialogue looking for exit doors for the phrases they are developing. The process is dynamic, technical without being boring, and with real, warm touches of the “acoustic” that is in their name. The way Gard Nilssen leads the band between groove and release is characteristic of him, that is, in his projects he is less concerned with the places his music encounters and more focused on the freedom that comes with it. “To Whom Who Buys A Record” is a discovery album. Now we just have to discover this Gard Nilssen Acoustic Unit live. AS