Nordic blues
Stuart Nicholson
A s every American is at pains to insist, rjazz is American. And in the sense that America was where it originated and America was where it evolved, it is, But this is only part of the story — a big part in the scheme of things I grant you, but nevertheless a part.
When the recording machine caught jazz's first stirrings as a provincial Southern music in the second decade of the 20th century, the music was immediately exported, courtesy of the gramophone record, around the world. But Americans, rather like parents dropping their teenagers off at university on the first day of term, prefer not to know what their offspring get up to away from home. Yet in recent years it has been developments outside America that have captured the imagination as American jazz has appeared polarised between a dead past and a future not yet born.
One area in particular that has forged ahead is Scandinavia. Sweden, for example, has a long history of engagement with jazz, even recording a `Cakewalk', an early pre-jazz style, as early as 1899. Subsequently, Sweden hosted a variety of visiting American jazz stars from Louis Armstrong to Duke Ellington in the 1930s, and from Dizzy Gillespie to Charlie Parker in the 1940s/1950s. Swedish musicians quickly passed from plausible imitation to the real thing when Stan Hasselgard, a brilliant young clarinettist, became a member of Benny Goodman's Septet in the late 1940s and Lars Guilin became the first European to win a jazz poll in the United States in 1954.
By the 1960s, the carefully nuanced sound of Jan Johansson's piano and the exquisite gradation of his touch on his 1964 album Jazz pa Svenska captured a unique sound in jazz, something that became known as the 'Nordic Tone', a way of playing that imposed a Scandinavian identity on jazz. 'The Nordic tonality is in fact a sort of blues, Nordic blues, Scandinavian blues, if you will,' explained drummer Egil Johansen. 'For us jazz musicians it's but a short leap to experience that melancholy as a companion to joy.'
In many ways, the Nordic Tone is analogous to Ingmar Bergman's approach to the cinema. Before Bergman, film mostly depicted the 'external' world, such as situation-comedy, war, costume dramas, westerns, crime and the chase. Very little important cinema made visible the internal drama of the self. Bergman found a way of exploring the human psyche, 'the battlefield of the soul', initially through the encouragement of Victor Sjostrom when he was artistic director of Svensk Filmidustri, who taught him about, 'The power of the naked face and to be simple, direct and tell a story.'
In the same way that Bergman avoided the external world, the obviousness of the grand movie themes, and instead explored the intensely felt, internalised emotions, the Nordic Tone avoids the 'external', the obviousness of the American penchant for extrovert technical display, exploring instead the innermost feelings of the psyche through investment in deeply felt, yet often simple and direct melodic storytelling.
All this becomes apparent on Esbjorn Svensson Trio's latest album Seven Days of Falling (Act 9012-2). One of those rare musicians who dispenses the common touch without compromising his art, Svensson is a pianist who favours a darkly intense lyricism that meets at the intersection of sensuality and soul. There's an emotional honesty in his playing that can become a musical confessional that is as unsettling as it is moving — check out 'Ballad for the Unborn' or 'Evening in Atlantis' and you'll see what I mean.
His exploration of intensely felt emotion through often simple yet direct melody exerts a kind of primal, downthrough-the-ages appeal to those innermost parts of the psyche you don't often hear from. Yet Svensson's Trio is equally concerned with musical ends as well as means, such as the ingenious musical chat-up line that opens 'Mingle in the Mincing Machine', combining bass and piano — it grabs your attention: Where's this going? What's this all about? This use of simplicity and complexity can be impressive in their momentary effect and draws you into the music.
While you may know the 'what' about a jazz piano trio, Svensson's group show that the 'how' can be very different when jazz is shaped by musicians from a very different cultural background to America. It only goes to show that these days, jazz, in being played by everyone, is now owned by no one.
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