By Stuart Broomer
When Sven-Åke Johansson died at 81, on June 15th of this year, he
had been an active explorer in multiple art forms for roughly sixty years,
including work at the frontiers of music’s possibilities, collaborating across
the rich spectrum of improvised music, and working in visual arts and theatre
as well. Two recent releases, one recorded in 2022, the other in 2025, place
him with similarly radical musicians, all several decades younger, all as
original as Johansson himself, their work further enlivened by his inspiring
presence. Most remarkably, the musics, though both improvised, are radically
different, one wandering loosely, the other immediate and tightly focussed,
but both essentially mysterious, elusive. There are virtually no overlaps in
instrumentation except Johansson’s drums, while his accordion, brought to bear
in the Café OTO performance, might oddly parallel the robot piano that
Nicholas Bussmann plays on Tea-Time. It is the genius of these musics
to elaborate utterly distinct social and communicative models, a tribute to
the openness and engagement of all of the contributors.
Nicholas Bussmann, Sven-Åke Johansson, Yan Jun – Tea-Time (Ni-Vu-Ni-Connu,
2024) *****
This recording from 2022 finds Johansson working with Nicholas Bussmann, a
composer and cellist who might be said to work at the edge of everything,
including computers, free improvisation and Chinese choral music. Among his
projects is the duo of Kapital Band 1 with drummer Martin Brandlmayr in which
Bussman “plays” robot piano, the programmable instrument he also plays here.
The third member of the trio, Yan Jun, is a Beijing-based singer, musician and
poet who has worked with Bussmann on remarkably speculative works like
The News Trilogy / Revolution Songs in an AI Environment, easier to listen to than describe.
Yan Jun’s broad range of vocal techniques will link him to both traditional
and post-modern musics. Here it can be a strange warbling that suggests
Tibetan throat singing and other incantatory practices. Together the three
create one of the decade’s most mysterious recordings, a unique sonic work
that is also especially engaging, suspended across continents, tethered to its
own benign universe.
On the recording’s Bandcamp page, commentator Kristoffer Cornils emphasizes
the quality of a dream, pointing out Bussman’s suggestion that “the joint
improvisations that you hear on Tea-Time capture a sound that once came
to [him] in a dream and that he made a reality with the help of his fellow
musicians.” He also cites Bussman describing the work’s “double fakeness of
fake jazz meeting fake throat singing”. The work is perfectly comfortable in
its strangeness and its assemblage. Bussmann creates at times a kind of
fragmentary ragtime, something genuinely random; Yan Jun’s performance ranges
from something like moaning and wandering in pitch to gravelly approximations
of traditional throat-singing. Always at the ready, Johansson provides
shifting rhythmic patterns, precise, dynamic, and, like the other elements,
somehow detached, whether from its surroundings or, delightfully, everything
else.
There is no self-consciousness here, no more sense of forced creativity than
of forced convention. This is genuine playing, that is, play,
that sense of difference here displacing any commonplace pattern recognition
or sense of interaction; this playful construction and exploration lead
somewhere beyond comprehension, its dream logic a positive route to genuine
creative growth. Vision is vision and, here and elsewhere, Bussmann’s revolt
against the conventions of improvised music may be as effective in his
practice as Randy Weston’s transformative experience at a Gnawa healing
ceremony, Ornette Coleman’s harmolodics or Anthony Braxton’s overlapping of
contradictory formal practices. Its insistences, its occasional rushing a
beat, its genuinely polyrhythmic and poly-spatial play, all eventually gather:
beyond its essential challenge to almost any sense of convention, the music
will lead to spaces that are radically original; further, they are also
original in that they belong, in some sense, to a listener’s willing, even
willful, acts of acceptance and assemblage.
By the end of Tea-Time (the title suggests, as does the work, repose,
serenity, yes, but also the antique, the formal, a hierarchy of staged
conventions), the three musicians have developed a highly distinctive zone, a
kind of pure music that is liberated from intentionality, a collective
improvisation that also suggests a collected music.
Sven-Åke Johansson, Pierre Borel, Seymour Wright, Joel Grip - Two Days at Café
OTO (OTOROKU, 2025) *****
Two Days at Café OTO documents an extraordinary quartet with the alto
saxophonists Pierre Borel and Seymour Wright and bassist Joel Grip. Each night
begins with a trio and ends with the full quartet. The first night’s trio has
Wright; the second night has Borel. The first night also has a brief
centerpiece, a five-minute quartet with Johansson on accordion, Borel taking
his place at the drum kit, with Wright and Grip playing their usual
instruments.
The music possesses a unique sense of the dynamic, with an internal delicacy
that one might not expect from a band that’s half of [Ahmed] (Wright and Grip)
or half of the bar-drug-dream sequence band (Borel and Grip) of the film
The Brutalist. The trio with Wright has a startling delicacy, with the
intensity and reiterative phrases distinctive in his work, but somehow
softened, resulting in a fresh lyricism. The first extended quartet piece
emphasizes both the principle of dialogue practiced by the two saxophonists
and their distinctive sounds and lines. Like all the music here, it breathes
life, a kind of ideal meeting of four distinguished musicians willing to
engage with a minimum of preconceptions and a commitment to spontaneity.
The second LP begins with the set’s longest track, a trio performance by
Borel, Grip and Johansson that begins with a kind of Morse Code interplay
between alto saxophone and bass. Whether in quartet or trio formation, the
musicians are tightly focused, subliminal and shifting structures almost
always in view, developing continuously throughout. Moments arise here in
which Wright appears to be present, but which ultimately reveal themselves to
be Grip’s virtuoso bowing. Borel moves on and off Mic suggesting duet play as
well, something else he creates by alternating short melodic phrases with
sustained multiphonics. There’s a natural conclusion, a pause, Johansson
launches another movement. Grip will pause after a solo interlude. Johansson
eventually launches a tom-tom pattern. Grip enters again. Borel will sustain a
continuous high harmonic throughout an extended bass passage. A hard-edged and
extended bass solo eventually entices Johansson’s accordion to the fore, which
inspires Borel to some strange hard-edged funk (there’s a Mingus theme
underpinning some of this). Each of these extended forays will eventually
become revelatory, sometimes pitched between mayhem and sentiment – unlikely
poles that become points of exchange. Multiple whistles arise.
The final quartet begins in radically different sonic territory, with the two
alto saxophonists exploring isolated upper registers in a strangely
abstracted, reed ensemble including Johansson, who for a time plays accordion
again. When he turns to drums, the prior pointillist dialogue between Borel
and Wright continues, short melodic fragments, isolated honks and smears
ricocheting between the two in an intertwining duet in which they can fall
into honking in unison, shifting the notion of collective improvisation toward
simultaneous composition. Uncanny elements arise, like a sustained, ascending
high tone that may be hard to assign to either wind; as it develops, it
eventually reveals Grip’s arco bass, pitches eventually close enough to merge
with one of the altos in one of the year’s most brilliant recordings of
collectively improvised music. The piece continues with Borel’s own swirling,
ascending phrases poised against Wright’s honks, Grip’s harmonics and
Johansson’s almost military snare, a passage of conjoined alto cries and
cymbals sufficient to suggest one of Albert Ayler’s more sacred conclusions,
just before Johansson turns again to the accordion and Grip contributes a
repeated ascending figure to the end.
