The Danish piano auteur Carsten Dahland the dynamic American trumpetist Tim Hagans meet the acclaimed Swedish double bass player Johnny Åman and the Finnish master drummer Jukkis Uotilaon the new album A Beautiful Blue Moment, now available on Storyville Records. Actually, this rare quartet had never played together, before they gathered at the scene of the historic jazz club Montmartre in Copenhagen and played the music of the moment at three sold out evenings in August 2021.

Based in Luleå, Sweden, a town roughly 160 kilometers south of the Arctic Circle, the Norrbotten Big Band (NBB) is living proof that jazz is truly a universal music with a remarkable ability to transcend geographical boundaries and cultural differences in its diffusion and appeal.
In this unlikely setting, a vast Nordic region where the nomadic Sami people have been tending their reindeer herds for centuries, the NBB - which since 1996 has been under the artistic direction of the imaginative American trumpeter and composer Tim Hagans - has established itself as Sweden’s representative within the ranks of European ensembles like Germany’s WDR Big Band that have adapted the classic American jazz big band tradition of the Swing and Post-War eras…