I was in Town Square Park, but I couldn't believe I was in Anchorage. The music I heard was too exciting and unusual, not the conventional stuff I grew up with here at all.
A slender woman in a fedora conducted the Anchorage Symphony with jerky grace. It was a sunny afternoon in late May. The musicians played classical instruments to strange electronic sounds created randomly by a computer's interpretation of GPS data from nine People Mover buses. The overall sense of the piece was of a huge shimmering creature aloft, unable to land.
Maybe "Movin People" sounded like it wasn't from here because the person who thought of it and conducted it, Yngvil Vatn Guttu, isn't from here. She has never fully landed herself. She is a boundlessly talented Norwegian, married to a woman who lives in Homer, spending months at a time playing trumpet in jazz clubs in New York.
But as Vatn Guttu pointed out, most people really aren't from here. That's why this place grows and changes so rapidly, including with the spawning of an increasingly adventurous art and music scene in the last decade. Of which she is a big part.
"People at the top of the world, less gravity pulls us down," Vatn Guttu said. "So this one disease that I have, that I can't sit still for very long and that I go here and there -- that is the Alaskan way."
Vatn Guttu set off from Norway to London at 21 to be an actor. She had rapid success. Over seven years she performed and created with many theater groups, composed and played music in shows, and spent a year acting and touring with a West End company.
She hooked up with a small Scottish theater company that scored big success with a show based on the 1950s children's film, "The Red Balloon." An agent picked it up and booked the troupe all over the United States, including a run on Broadway in 2000 that won a rave review in the New York Times, mentioning Vatn Guttu by name.
In 2002, when the show played in Anchorage, Vatn Guttu jumped ship and decided to stay. The worst career decision she could make, she said, and one that perplexed even her friends and admirers.
The mountains did it to her, as they have to so many before. And the newness and opportunity to start over as an artist -- she said Anchorage feels like Oslo felt when she was a kid. And she felt something different from the "Red Balloon" audiences here.
"The audiences in Anchorage we had were great," she said "It was the most community feel that I'd ever had. I had been on the road 11 years and just toured and toured and toured, and apart from Galway Bay in Ireland I didn't get a sense of a full audience of 700 people that kind of knew who they were and felt like they were from somewhere. They were the Anchorage audience."
Anchorage audiences are notoriously undiscriminating. It's an easy place to get a standing ovation or to slip by with a mediocre performance. But Vatn Guttu said Anchorage gives performers a safe place to grow. Amateur and community theater can make big artistic statements without having great technical prowess. Musicians can write bad songs until they learn to write good ones.
That's long been true, but now more is happening, said Vatn Guttu's friend and collaborator Laura Oden (the "Urban Conflux" event in Town Square was her idea, and Chris Jette and Code for Anchorage developed the bus sounds). In the 1990s Oden performed in a duo called the Pagan Cowgirlz. Few local singers were writing their own songs. After leaving music for 15 years, she was astonished to come back and see how the scene had developed.
"We've become this little singer-songwriter city. I'm embarrassed to say 'the Nashville of the north,' but it's true," Oden said.
Part of that change came about through the hard work of a handful of promoters, bar owners and musicians, who created spaces, built audiences and nurtured new artists. John Damberg's Alaska Jazz Workshop, which he has run for 20 years, has introduced more than 3,000 students to improvisation. He is building an audience for his John Damberg Latin Jazz Quintet by training listeners.
With other musicians, Damberg helped Vatn Guttu start the Spenard Jazz Fest, now going into its ninth year, but he dropped out of organizing because she moved too fast. He's the ant and she's the grasshopper. On the other hand, she helped him learn to get grants, by showing the importance of expressing original artistic ideas personally to donors.
"You have to dig really deep into your inner psyche, and I don't think a lot of musicians want to go there. And Yngvil is really good at going there," he said.
Vatn Guttu plays many instruments, performs in many genres and settings, and works on many projects at once. Recently she set up a video filming session for a collection of seven local musical acts. One of her own bands stole the show, called Yada Di, fronted by Inupiaq performance artist Aku-Matu (Allison Warden), who fully inhabited the soul of a drowning polar bear amid a powerful rock soundscape.
I was electrified. It was unforgettable.
But it was a tiny slice of Vatn Guttu, just another fun band that doesn't practice and hasn't recorded. It's part of the magic of Anchorage.
"I don't feel tucked away in a small little community," she said. "I feel like the world is my oyster. I can do whatever I want and feel a lot of people would care enough about me -- for me to come back. It's just right."
Charles Wohlforth's column appears three times weekly. A life-long Anchorage resident, he is the author of more than 10 books, and hosts radio shows on Alaska Public Media. Find him on facebook.