MEUF: Lene Grenager & Lotte Anker

MEUF at Juret | Oslojazz 2024

Look forward to three intimate afternoon concerts in duo format with a focus on improvisation, presenting some of the most interesting female artists on the Nordic experimental music scene at the small bar Juret during the Oslo Jazz Festival.

Lene Grenager is a formidable and unique Norwegian cellist and composer. As a cellist, she works both with improvised and notated music, mainly in the quartets SPUNK and Lemur, in a duo with Sofia Jernberg and as a solo artist. She has played concerts all over Europe and in the USA and as a composer she has written for ensembles such as the Oslo Philharmonic, Cikada, Bit 20, the Kringkastingsorkesteret, Trondheim Sinfonietta, Trondheim Symphony Orchestra, Kristiansand Symphony Orchestra, Alpaca, Ensemble Zwischentöne and Duo Ego.

Lotte Anker is an unrivaled composer and saxophonist, but Danish and living in Copenhagen. She also works in the field between experimental jazz/improvisation and contemporary music. Her music includes both melodic (often twisted or fragmented) elements and more abstract textural material, covering a wide territory from minimal transparency to dense and dark expressionism. Lotte Anker has been the initiator and bandleader of a number of highly recognized collaborations and groups such as Anker, Taborn, Cleaver (w/ Craig Taborn and Gerald Cleaver), Trio with Sylvie Courvoisier and Ikue Mori and Mokuto, to name a few. Other recent projects are the 8-man group What River Ensemble, a duo with Fred Frith and a quartet with Johannes Bauer, Clayton Thomas and Paul Lovens.

MEUF is both the name of a concert series and 2 album releases, which arose in 2023 as a new annual tradition where a compilation is released on Barefoot Records on March 8, with new collaborations between women and gender minorities, curated and initiated by a composer and saxophonist Maria Dybbroe.

The idea of ​​MEUF is to shine a spotlight on some of the most interesting non-male musicians on the Nordic scene for experimental music and improvisation, as well as forge new ties between non-male artists in the Nordics, who due to their minority in the music industry may feel that they lack colleagues who, by virtue of their gender and minority status, are similar to themselves.