By João Esteves da Silva
This album is not just a delightful listening experience. It is also an
important artistic statement. And it is so for mainly two reasons, both of
which amount to powerful ways of undermining the tiresome jazz/classical
music dichotomy. The first has to do with STHLM svaga’s very concept, once
again beautifully realized: to play jazz and free jazz music quietly. The
second concerns the way the artists – Ron Carter, Roscoe Mitchell, Archie
Shepp, John Coltrane and Per Henrik Wallin – whose works are here performed
are taken: as composers, in a classical sense.
This album is not just a delightful listening experience. It is also an
important artistic statement. And it is so for mainly two reasons, both of
which amount to powerful ways of undermining the tiresome jazz/classical
music dichotomy. The first has to do with STHLM svaga’s very concept, once
again beautifully realized: to play jazz and free jazz music
quietly
. The second concerns the way the artists – Ron Carter, Roscoe Mitchell,
Archie Shepp, John Coltrane and Per Henrik Wallin – whose works are here
performed are taken: as composers, in a classical sense.
If jazz is anything at all, it is a specific a musical language,
one with countless variants and sub-variants. And this is indeed a jazz
album in the sense that most of its main vocabularies are drawn from such a
language. Such vocabularies are, however, approached in an unusual way.
Unlike so-called contemporary classical music or free improvisation, for
instance, jazz has not been particularly noted for making the most of the
full range of dynamics. Most notably, there has been a tendency in the jazz
tradition to overlook its quieter end. As Alexander Hawkins puts it in his
brilliant liner notes, “many of us will have been in those jazz rehearsals
where the sum total of engagement with dynamics at all is something along
the lines of ‘let’s play that bit a little quieter’.” Now, the radicalness
of these exceptional Swedish musicians lies precisely in that they
deliberately restrict themselves to such end of the spectrum, thus
exploring it at multiple levels of nuance. To quote Hawkins again, “[h]ere
in this precarious state, a microcosm of detail, expression and effort are
magnified.” A case in point is the opening track, where saxophonist Johan
Jutterström and drummer Andreas Hiroui Larsson approach Coltrane’s
“Jupiter” (from Interstellar Space) with the utmost subtlety, so
that every sound they emit acquires an extra level of significance.
Plays Carter, Plays Mitchell, Plays Shepp: this could have been
the structure of the title of a classical music album (think of, e.g.,
Volodos plays Brahms). And that brings us to the second point. Jazz
is, of course, a practice which demands a significant creative
endeavour from the performer, but, even in this respect, the difference
between it and classical music is one of degree, not of kind. (Despite
comprising a selection of pieces by William Byrd and Orlando Gibbons, isn’t
Glenn Gould’s legendary A Consort of Musicke more a Gould album
than a Byrd and Gibbons one?) So, ultimately, the main difference between
(Black musician-composers) Carter, Mitchell and Shepp, three key names in
jazz history, and, say, (White composers) Ligeti, Sciarrino or Nono may
well amount to a matter of presentation. Here, the former are
explicitly presented qua composers. (In fact, not just composers but
composers of specially commissioned pieces, a widespread practice in
contemporary classical music circles.) And that alone is a statement. (On
the other hand, the album itself is presented almost as a kind of chamber
music program, with the ensemble adopting different configurations
depending on the repertoire at hand.)
It should thus be no coincidence that at the heart of the album lies a
piece by Roscoe Mitchell, “Never Sound More” (arguably my favorite of the
lot). For here we do not simply get a reshaping of the jazz language
through the adoption of the aforementioned dynamic parameters. Rather, as
is often the case in Mitchell’s work, the very jazz/contemporary classical
distinction is altogether blurred at the idiomatic level.
STHLM svaga is:
Linda Oláh (vocals)
Niklas Barnö (trumpet)
Gustav Rådström (alto sax)
Johan Jutterström (tenor sax)
Rasmus Borg (piano)
Elsa Bergman (double bass)
Andreas Hiroui Larsson (drums)