American jazz is dead but the music lives on in Europe, infused with the shock of the new, Bugge Wesseltoft tells Jim Carroll.

Follow Bugge Wesseltoft's story and you're following one of the most vibrant trails ever taken in modern jazz. The keyboardist has been one of the key Nordic players involved in initiating a conversation between jazz and electronica, a conversation which is still producing fascinating tangents and asides.

For Wesseltoft, this was the spark which led to the New Conception of Jazz series of albums and live shows, a sound he has honed and groomed for the past decade.

But, in 2005, what was once new is now looking a little old to its creator. Wesseltoft, who comes to Dublin in June, is already looking beyond the nu-jazz horizon to see what the future holds.

"I'm in a period of transition at the moment and I'm changing my musical hat," he says. "I'm not quite sure what I will do now. I've been working on the New Conception of Jazz project for the last 10 years, so I do want to do something different. I'm quite proud of it, but I do feel like I can't go much further with what I was doing with that. It's time for a change."

Anticipating where any change may lead, Wesseltoft's recent live shows have had two distinct halves. "The first part is a solo show, very acoustic and ambient and abstract. The other half is me with my trio, which is more electronic."

Wesseltoft grew up on a rich brew of music, from the jazz supremacy of Herbie Hancock to such early electronic kingpins as Kraftwerk. It was his acquisition of a Fender Rhodes piano at the age of 16 which accidentally set him on the road to becoming a professional musician. After moving to Oslo in the mid-1980s, he began to record and perform with such leading Norwegian players as Arild Anderson and Jan Garbarek, and slowly began to feel the need for a new take on what he was doing.

"I think by the early 1990s that jazz in Norway had stopped renewing itself. Norwegians are very open-minded and, when it comes to jazz, we have had great inspiration from players from the older generation like Jan Garbarek and Jon Christensen. They taught us to search for our own way of making music, our own individual spirit. That was what they did - they found their own way of playing jazz, and it has been hugely influential on the younger jazz players."

For Wesseltoft and other young guns such as Nils Petter Molvaer, the new way involved using some electronic trickery. "Instead of just going into a studio with a trio or quartet and recording some live jazz stuff, I started to make some backgrounds on the computer, using beats, sounds and riffs. Then we went into the studio and played on top of them."

The reaction to these New Conception of Jazz recordings was astonishing and led to eager chatter about a nu-jazz sound rising in the Nordic countries. Further releases by Wesseltoft, such as Sharing (1999) and Moving (2001), simply reinforced the sense that jazz had taken a huge step forward.

It was also a very European sound, hugely different in spirit and execution to what players across the Atlantic were producing. "Yes, there is something specially European about this music," agrees Wesseltoft. "Jazz is American, of course, but I feel that the electronics scene is more European.

"American jazz is a very difficult issue for me. I'd actually go so far as to say that jazz is dead in America. It's music for lawyers and dentists and academics. There are no kids listening to jazz there. The spirit that jazz once had in America, the spirit which attracted me in the first place, is gone and you can find that same spirit and power now only in things like hip-hop. People have lost interest in jazz."

Wesseltoft believes the fault for this lies with traditionalists and revisionists such as Wynton Marsalis. "He has destroyed jazz," the Norwegian says bluntly. "He's a fantastic player but, for me, he has killed the spirit which jazz once had because he made it a museum exhibit. Who wants to listen to that? I love jazz, but I would much rather listen to my old albums from the '60s than what he's doing. Louis Armstrong is more modern than Marsalis ever will be."

Yet the American players Wesseltoft has worked with do not demonstrate such disregard for innovation and new thinking. "Most of the American musicians I know are not like Marsalis. They have to come to Europe to make money because there is practically no jazz scene in the States. Some of them, like Joshua Redman, are quite open-minded and enthusiastic about what we're doing.

"I think it's down to the fact that we are good musicians regardless of how influenced we are by electronica or house. It's not just a drum machine with loads of noodling on top. It's a fully improvisational thing which the Americans respond to. We just start to play and see what's happening. Sure, we steal some samples from jazz records, but 90 per cent of what we play live is improvised on the spot."

It's not just jazzers who nod their heads to Wesseltoft's grooves. French electronica supremo Laurent Garnier has been a longtime champion and the pair have collaborated both live and on record.

"Laurent came to see us in Paris four or five years ago and he liked what we were doing. After that, we started to meet regularly and he has guested with my band and we're still doing concerts together."

Wesseltoft thrives on such collaborations. "When you play with people who are really good at what they do, it always helps your own music. It's fabulous to work with people who have such great knowledge about music. You have to get inspiration from things and sounds outside yourself and your direct environment. I'm quite a nerd, so I listen to a lot of music and talk a lot about music because I'm trying to form my own path through it all."

There's still a distance for Wesseltoft to go. When he's not talking about where his current transitional phase might lead, he's thinking about other sounds and possibilities. A few years ago, he bought a Hammond B3 organ, which has been lying idle since. Now, he thinks, the time may be right to bring it out of storage.

"Maybe it's time for me to start a band based around the Hammond. I'd like to have a sound which is like Deep Purple's John Lord meets avant-garde music, the Hammond played through a big Marshall stack." The mind boggles at where that one might end up.

Bugge Wesseltoft plays Crawdaddy, Dublin on June 2nd as part of the Bud Rising Festival