Randi Hultin - Images from a Life in Jazz

"My genuine interest in jazz didn't awaken until I brought jazz into my living room," writes music journalist Randi Hultin (1926–2000) in her autobiography "In the Sign of Jazz" (1991). 

The photographs in this exhibition were taken by Hultin, many of them in her home on Gartnerveien in Høyenhall, Oslo. From the 1950s to the 1990s, Hultin regularly hosted many of jazz's biggest names, from domestic musicians like Radka Toneff, Karin Krog, and Jan Garbarek to global stars like Sonny Rollins, Stan Getz, and John Coltrane. You can hardly get jazz more directly into your living room.

Randi Hultin was unschooled as a photographer, but the thousands of photographs and audio and film recordings she left behind are a documentary treasure trove that gives us, as observers, intimate and sometimes surprising insights into the social life of jazz. Above all, they show why Randi Hultin remains an institution in Norwegian jazz history.