FIRE! Day 1: OLA TUNJI + ØKSE

BRAND! Festival 2026 opens with a double bill that immediately embraces danger: Belgische Ola Tunji - flourishing in free jazz - and ØKSE, which, under the leadership of Danish key figure Mette Rasmussen, sounds as if the Monday Club from Kresten Osgoods stories never closed its doors. OLA TUNJI Since the summer of 2025, things have been moving fast for Ola Tunji, the Brussels quartet around saxophonist Ornella Noulet, with a shared dedication to the spiritual jazz of John Coltrane. They snatched up prizes at Gent Jazz Talent and Avignon Jazz Festival. Their music breathes the intensity and openness of the New Thing movement, the free jazz from the sixties. Their name is a tribute to Babatunde Olatunji, the Nigerian percussionist and friend of John Coltrane, who introduced African percussion to the American jazz audience and helped shape the spiritual dimension of sixties jazz. Inspired by the Coltranes, Pharoah Sanders, and Albert Ayler, the group embraces improvisation as a political and spiritual act. At BRAND!, they are presenting their upcoming debut album (W.E.R.F. Records). In the context of a JazzLab tour. Saxophones, percussion: Ornella Noulet • drums, percussion: Egon Wolfson • piano: Oscar Teruel • double bass: Anthony Jouravsky • image: © Dario Holtz ØKSE ØKSE means axe in Danish - one of the oldest tools of man: raw and precise, practical and mythical at the same time. But ØKSE is more than just steel and wood: it is also Ashe - the life force that flows through everything, living or inanimate. Ashe is a groove you can tap into; whoever follows it will encounter this international star ensemble on their path. The quartet of the New York-based drummer Savannah Harris, the Danish saxophonist Mette Rasmussen, the Haitian electronic musician Val Jeanty, and the Zweed Petter Eldh on bass, synths, and sampler kicks off BRAND! 2026 with an appropriate dose of bravado. Their debut ØKSE was released in 2024 on the renowned Backwoodz label. In 2025, the band won both the Deutsche Jazzpreis and the Danish Music Award Jazz. Critics hear “everything from jazz to joik to rap to Haïtiaanse Vodou” and praise how ØKSE shatters the glass wall between hip-hop and free jazz. The cause for all that clinking glass is the friction between improvisation and groove - music that requires new standards. Drums: Savannah Harris • saxophone: Mette Rasmussen • electronics: Val Jeanty • bass: Petter Eldh • image: © Juliane Schütz