Bitches Blues

Description

"Weejuns is above all about interaction," explains Mollestad, a former Young Jazz Talent of the Year and artist-in-residence in her native Norway. "Bitches Blues consists of six instrumental pieces, or musical fragments, with an extremely rich dynamic. Some are built around powerful rhythms, while others are much more lyrical and rubato. There's everything from riff-based rock to sonic chaos, melancholic ballads, and even completely free improvisations." Adopting an approach that is both cultivated and instinctively fresh in the intertwining of instruments and influences, Bitches Blues (a play on Miles Davis's album Bitches Brew) oscillates unpredictably between slow, gentle pieces with well-defined sections and controlled chord progressions, and cathartic, complex explosions. The Weejuns (a familiar abbreviation for "Norwegians") debuted in 2023 with a self-titled double live album. Initially formed by Mollestad for the Kongsberg Jazz Festival, where she had received the prestigious Musicians' Prize, the Weejuns group has managed to maintain and captivate its audience, notably by providing a counterpoint to the most intense Hedvig Mollestad Trio album to date, Bees in the Bonnet (2025). A graduate of the Norwegian Academy of Music, Mollestad has released eight critically acclaimed albums with her eponymous trio, toured Europe and North America, and performed with artists such as Nels Cline, Colin Stetson, Ingrid Laubrock, Trevor Dunn, and Shahzad Ismaily. Her signature, forged over a fifteen-year career, is to combine great technical mastery with a deliberate pursuit of musical pleasure. For years, Mollestad has devoted herself body and soul to music. The daughter of a jazz musician, she immersed herself in his record collection, studying the classics of Miles Davis, Charlie Parker, Joe Pass, and Jim Hall before discovering, in her twenties, riffing titans like Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath, and the Mahavishnu Orchestra. This led to the formation of the Hedvig Mollestad Trio, whose relentless pace of recording and touring since the early 2010s has earned the guitarist a shower of awards, including two Norwegian Grammy Awards (Spellemannprisen) and a spot on DownBeat magazine's list of 25 artists "likely to shape jazz for decades to come" in November 2020. Ståle Storløkken is the founder and long-time member of Supersilent and Elephant9, Terje Rypdal's right-hand man since the mid-1990s, and has collaborated with Motorpsycho on record and on stage... as well as with countless other artists. Ole Mofjell is the youngest member, active with Krokofant, Signe Emmeluth's Amoeba, and his own free jazz trio 3 Days Of Maceration.