Laura Toxværd

Seventh episode of Talking & Improvising. This episode features conversations in words and music between bass player Jesper Nordberg and the Danish saxophone player, composer, and researcher Laura Toxværd. The podcast was recorded in February 2024, with financial support from the Swedish Arts Council. Laura Toxvaerd is a Danish saxophonist, composer, and researcher brought up in the tradition of jazz music. Her particular interests became avant-garde and free jazz, and eventually contemporary music. As a composer, she often explores the realm of graphic notations. In this special working technique, she brings together visual art and music. The author of The Penguin Guide to Jazz Recordings, Brian Morton, describes her scores as ”a clever combination of visual material”, the music is ”as sensuous as it is intellectually challenging”, and the compositions ”are simply wonderful”. In later years, she has been researching as a PhD student at Agder University in Norway, resulting in her doctoral thesis ”The making of manifold musical becomings”. Jesper Nordberg is a young Swedish double bass player. He has studied at the famed Rhythmic Music Conservatory in Copenhagen. He has worked with a number of prominent European and American improvising musicians, such as Okay Temiz, Brandon Lopez, Jesper Zeuthen, and Kasper Tranberg. With a grand tone and characteristic feel for rhythmical changes and displacements, he has established himself as an individual voice at the jazz scenes of Copenhagen and Malmö. He takes a big interest in folk music from the Balkans, and has collaborated with musicians from Croatia, Serbia, Macedonia, Turkey, and Romania.