Legendary Swedish, Berlin-based Sven-Åke Johansson composer, drummer-percussionist, poet, writer, and visual artist, will celebrate his 82th birthday and six decades of work this year. He belongs to the first generation of European free improvisers, known for his work with Peter Brötzmann’s earliest and some of his most important projects, including Machine Gun, but has never limited himself to any single artistic discipline. in an interview with the Berlin newspaper Taz, defined his work: “My work is not actually jazz, but rather the exploration of sounds. In that sense, my music defies some categorizations. Jazz is only a small part of what I do”.
Hautzinger / Schick / Johansson - Rotations + (Trost, 2025)
Rotations+ is a free improvised trio featuring Johansson on percussion and accordion, German turntable wizard Ignaz Schick on turntables, and Austrian trumpeter Franz Hautzinger on trumpets. Both players use electronics. The trio was recorded live at the Berlin experimental venue KM28 in September 2023. The six collective improvisations adapt the syntax of reductionist electronic music and explore a deep forest of subtle colors and timbre, with each improvisation suggesting a fresh and unpredictable perspective.
Johansson’s elegant sense of time is still remarkable, adding loose structural narratives with a kaleidoscopic, rhythmic sensibility to Hautzinger’s minimalist, extended breathing smears and cries and Schick’s delicate yet noisy and sometimes cartoonish beeps and bloops. At times, Johansson’s drumming even adds a ritualist dimension to the abstract and fragile interplay of Hautzinger and Schick, immediately disciplining exotic overtones (as on “R2”) and bringing a heightened form of spontaneous sound sculpting, something Johansson has been doing since the early 1970s. His accordion playing, on “R3” and the last “R6” improvisations, injects a subversive, romantic touch to the abstract and often nervous interplay of Hauztzinger and Schick.
Sven-Åke Johansson Quintet - Stumps (Second Version) (Trost, 2025)
Johansson first introduced the book of compositions used for his Stumps project on the album Stumps (Ni-Vu-Ni-Connu, 2022), recorded live at Au Topsi Pohl in Berlin in December 2021, with a quintet of Johansoon’s long-time collaborator, German trumpeter Axel Dörner, Swedish double bass player Joel Grip (of أحمد [Ahmed], another trusted collaborated of Johansson), and young French sax player Pierre Borel (of Die Hochstapler and Sebastian Gramss' States Of Play) and pianist Simon Sieger, and Johannson on drums.
Johansson referred to this book of six compositions as the magnum opus of his small group writing. Extended versions of “stumps 2” to “stumps 6” are included on Stumps (Second Version), recorded live one year after Stumps (which included all six compositions), at Haus der Berliner Festspiele during Jazzfest Berlin in November 2022. These compositions are based on strict, schematic instructions and offer a potential for variation with falling and rising short signals (notes). Each “stump” composition repeats the simple yet captivating theme four times and establishes its light-swinging pulse. Each “stump” alters the melodic and rhythmic shape of the basic formula and ignites a distinct kind of thoughtful deconstruction with introspective collective improvisation and solo excursions. A simple repetition of the theme at the end rounds off the composition as a kind of return. The underlying tempi of the themes are rather calm, there is no fixed tempo but more of a free positioning, according to the principle of ‘free tempo/dynamic vibration’.
Johansson leads the ensemble with commanding, modest, and always elegant authority and his trademark rolling cymbal pulse and stuttering snare drum keep the music forward. These compositions, despite their strict formula and repetitive themes, demand probing individual playing, and this ensemble brilliantly performs them.
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