Being a respected regional musician has its good points and its not so good points. Nils Petter Molvaer, who was born in 1960 and raised on an island off the northwest coast of Norway, eventually made his way to Oslo in the early '80s and became the most acclaimed trumpeter in the city's burgeoning jazz community, but his local success sealed him off from the larger world. On the other hand, untainted by constant professional exposure to influences that might have turned his head, he immersed himself in his first love, electric Miles Davis, simmering in the expressionistic juices of the master's last great experimental phase.
It wasn't until 1997 that Molvaer made his solo mark outside of Scandinavia. In that year he released "Khmer" on ECM, the German jazz label that refuses to stick to jazz, having released all of Keith Jarrett's classical recordings, not to mention the work of Estonian composer Arvo Part.