Sofia Jernberg and Nick Dunston: an anti-singer and an anti-opera

By João Esteves da Silva

Released just one week apart back in April, these were arguably my two favorite albums of 2024 with some (remote) connection to the jazz category (alongside maybe Matt Mitchell’s solo piano album Illimitable). They are also interestingly related, beyond the fact that composer-singer Sofia Jernberg is present in both of them - as a main protagonist in Musho, a duo with composer-pianist Alexander Hawkins, and as part of a larger, intricate tapestry in composer-bassist Nick Dunston’s COLLA VOCE. Both are, as I take it, groundbreaking statements, featuring among the most significant albums to have been released lately. In particular, both radically question the role of the voice in twenty-first century music. If I were to classify them somehow, I’d say something like “avant-garde world music” wouldn’t fit Musho too badly and, despite its versatility, I wouldn’t mind placing COLLA VOCE in the contemporary classical shelf. But, in fairness, both works are really sui generis.

Alexander Hawkins & Sofia Jernberg - Musho (Intakt, 2024) ***** 

When faced with Musho’s cover, one must be struck by the fact that the singer’s name comes below the pianist’s, for the convention tells us that it should be the other way around, even in cases where the latter happens to be the main composer. This subtle subversion is itself telling: Musho shouldn’t be taken as different in kind from Hawkins’s other duo collaborations with notable women musician-composers such as Tomeka Reid, Angelika Niescier or Nicole Mitchell. There’s a more substantial view implicit here: even when performing songs (with words), the voice is simply another instrument (with its own unique features, of course), on a par with the cello, the saxophone, or the flute; and the singer is simply another musician, here on a par with the pianist. The conventional singer/accompanist hierarchy is thus shattered, and so both singer and pianist are emancipated: they are still free to stick to more or less conventional roles, if they so wish, but can also embrace all the remaining possibilities their instruments offer; and, crucially, they present themselves to audiences as equals: a genuine duo of musician-composers.

The singer qua musicianconception (and its voice qua instrument counterpart) has been prominent in creative music for some time now, but few have made as powerful and persuasive a case for it as Jernberg. She is the ultimate anti-singer, in a sense that goes even beyond the emancipation of her instrument: while breaking new ground at the musical (or sonic) level, she rejects all sorts of extra-musical diversions that often intrude the ways in which artists (especially women singers) are publicly perceived (and judged), namely uses of her image for marketing purposes or stage performance antics. This is not just as an artistic statement but a political one, radically at odds with the kind of liberal (pseudo-)feminism that preaches “women’s empowerment” without seriously questioning the very power dynamics that foster the oppression of women in the first place. And she does all this while being one of the most formidable singers around, with a gorgeous (and instantly recognizable) timbre and mind-blowing technical resources, which she deploys with a rare intelligence and taste.

Together with Hawkins, another true musical polymath, Jernberg has created a sound world that is both genreless and timeless, and as interesting as it is moving: a song cycle comprising material from various traditions (Ethiopian, Swedish, Armenian, English), but arranged and performed in such a way so as to form a single cohesive aesthetic, both breathtakingly beautiful and new. And, despite such cohesiveness, one is still able to trace what is peculiar to each of these traditions, i.e., we get a form of universality that does not overwhelm locality. (Here, too, one is bound to think of salient political analogies.)

Musho is a definite highlight of Hawkins’ already rich discography. And it is the perfect entry point into Jernberg’s art.

Nick Dunston - COLLA VOCE (Out Of Your Head, 2024) ***** 

An “Afro-Surrealist Anti-Opera”. That’s how Dunston describes COLLA VOCE , a kaleidoscopic work for string quartet, vocal quartet and chamber jazz ensemble, plus post-processing. The album, which is the work itself, was produced by Weston Olencki. Shortly after its release, Tyshawn Sorey won the Pulitzer Prize for Music with Adagio (For Wadada Leo Smith) , a work he then described as an “anti-concerto”. Now, is some kind of artistic (and, in a way, political) movement taking shape here? Possibly. One in which Black musician-composers, following on the great AACM tradition, confront the traditional media of (generally White) Western classical music and, instead of either submitting to their conventions or altogether rejecting them, subvert them in creatively adventurous ways, testing their very limits.

In the case of Sorey, we have a concerto for saxophone and orchestra which subverts the usual virtuoso role ascribed to the soloist: it’s an introspective, slowly unfolding work, and so an anti-virtuoso one; and, despite preserving the soloist-orchestra distinction to some extent, at times even an anti-soloist work, too, namely when the saxophone is withdrawn from its concerto-style prominence, blending into the orchestral texture instead.

The notion of an anti-operais perhaps less straightforward, but I’d say the aformentioned notion of an anti-singer may shed some light onto it: just as Hawkins and Jernberg overcome the singer/accompanist hierarchy, so does Dunston overcome the vocal/instrumental one on a larger scale. In fact, all four singers - Cansu Tanrikulu, Isabel Crespo Pardo, Friede Merze, and Jernberg herself - taking part in this anti-opera are themselves anti-singers of some kind. And this is to say that the roles ascribed to the JACK Quartet and the Berlin-based chamber jazz ensemble - comprising, alongside Dunston, violinist/violist Maria Reich, cellist Anil Eraslan, guitarist Tal Yahalom and drummer Moritz Baumgärtner - also go beyond what would have been commonly expected from them in an opera setting. At times the strings appear to scream, qua human voices, and there are occasions where the voices can be heard emitting string-like sounds, these being just two among many instances of unconventional stuff going on here.

Overall, Dunston, whose own double bass playing must also be lauded, achieves a remarkable balance between notation, spontaneous composition and post-production, making it hard to tell where one ends and the others begin. In particular, his string writing - formidably tackled by the formidable JACK players - is exceptional, totally devoid of cliché, somewhere in between the Wandelweiser aesthetic and harsh noise. He is a master at managing contrasts, and at reconciling (apparent) chaos with organization. One also gets subtle hints of modern NY jazz here and there, as well as more exotic or even hardcore sonorities. But despite all its sonic variety, COLLA VOCE is, ultimately, surprisingly cogent, although our very notion of cogency may well have been redefined by it.

While Musho is straightforwardly identifiable as a song cycle, no matter how subversive, one is bound to wonder whether COLLA VOCE is still recognizable as an opera at all. It’s a kind of duck-rabbit (to use Wittgenstein’s image), wavering between opera and something else - and that may be, at least partly, where its surrealism lies.