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 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 - Linda Oláh (vocals), Niklas Barnö (trumpet), Gustav Rådström (alto sax), Johan Jutterström (tenor sax), Rasmus Borg (piano), Elsa Bergman (double bass) and Andreas Hiroui Larsson (drums) - 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 Rådström and 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.
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