Bobo Stenson may have been groomed in straight-ahead American jazz, but with his trio he prefers a more melancholic mood, writes Stuart Nicholson.
'We play in the language of American jazz but we put other things into the music," says the Swedish jazz pianist Bobo Stenson. "We have our own traditions in Sweden, from classical music to folk music and I guess this finds its way into what we play."
Stenson is among the finest pianists in jazz. While he has played and recorded alongside the American jazz masters and is fluent in the unequivocal, hard driving American dialect of jazz, with his trio he prefers a less frenetic style of expressionism. Here, his playing shaped by a poet-like quest to find meaning beyond meaning, a carefully nuanced and understated style that can only be described as jazz with a European sensibility.
Yet is there such a thing as European jazz? The question is another great jazz imponderable.Yet, there's something decidedly appealing about the notion of European jazz, at least to Europeans, even if their attempts to define it don't go much beyond the self-evident, that European jazz is jazz played by Europeans.
But a European playing jazz does not always make for European jazz. While jazz may be a universal language, the dialect in which it is usually spoken is American. To break the mould poses problems of "authenticity", of whether an indigenous American music shaped by the Afro-American experience becomes less meaningful when played in a non-American way and suddenly we're up to our ears in semantics.
The answer probably lies in the fact that jazz is now no longer an exclusive American art form. Wherever the American dollar has gone, the English language and American cultural artefacts such as cinema, pop music, the baseball hat and McDonalds have followed. And jazz. Yet just as English has become a global lingua franca, jazz has become a musical lingua franca played in a variety of dialects, shaped by the cultural environment it has found itself in. Because of Europe's close engagement with America - Sweden, for example, recorded a "cakewalk" as early as 1899 - jazz was absorbed surprisingly quickly into its culture. By 1948, the young Swede Stan Hasselgard, a brilliant clarinettist, became a member of Benny Goodman's Septet, while by the mid-1950s, Lars Gullin was recognised as one of the finest baritone saxophonists in jazz. It was Gullin who began using jazz as a means of expressing Swedish culture by introducing folkloric elements into his playing.
By the early 1970s, several Scandinavian musicians, such as Bobo Stenson, Jan Garbarek, Terje Rypdal and Arlid Andersen, followed Gullin's example and gave rise to what has become known as the "Nordic Tone" in jazz; a pensive, melancholic style of jazz expressionism that projects the stark imagery of nature near the Northern Lights.
Stenson, born in 1944 in Vasteras in Sweden, quickly distinguished himself as one of Sweden's leading jazz musicians. He toured with Stan Getz in 1968, recorded with the US bassist Red Mitchell in 1969 and became associated with Jan Garbarek in the 1970s. From 1991 to 1997, he was pianist in the group lead by legendary US tenor saxophonist Charles Lloyd, making five critically acclaimed albums with him on the ECM label. Stenson was a key component in a group whose style embodied all the elements we have come to expect from American jazz; a contagious straight-ahead swing that allowed Lloyd's saxophone to mould expression and tension into minor miracles of the improviser's art.
"You can say with Charles this is 'traditional' American music, I think!" says Stenson. With Lloyd, Stenson's solos were dynamic and straight-ahead, the consummate American stylist, you might think. "These people were more in the 'traditional' way of playing jazz," he says. "It was straight-ahead with Charles, and I put something of that in my playing too. I felt it and enjoyed it, but with my trio it is different."
Formed in 1993 with Anders Jormin on bass and Jon Christensen on drums, Stenson's trio does not sacrifice rhythmic fluidity for mechanical exactness or lyric intensity for romantic indulgence, common failings of many European improvisers.
There is remarkable definition in his playing that is recognisably his own and he leaves spaces to inspire Jormin and Christensen to react intuitively and subversively.
"We have know each other for almost ever," says Stenson. "Christensen for about 30 years; we played a lot together in the 1970s with Garbarek, and Anders and I have played a lot together in this last 20 years."
Stenson's first trio album, Reflections (ECM) from 1996, was an unprecedented success, winning a Swedish Grammy and the Golden Record award, the first time any musician had claimed both honours.
The two albums that followed, War Orphans from 1998 and Serenity from 2000 (both ECM) received enormous critical acclaim, the interaction of the three players inviting comparison to the legendary Bill Evans Trio of 1961 with Scott La Faro on bass and Paul Motian on drums. "I just like the trio," Stenson continues. "It is a very nice setting - you don't have to wait for horn players! You can take the music where you want.
"First of all Christensen does not play straight ahead, he's more of a painter, splashes of sound. We don't need to play straight rhythm all the time. It's a very free way of playing, I think. Not free jazz, we play melodies and harmonies and structures, but we have a free-flowing kind of approach to it. More important, we don't need to play the American way, we can leave that and come back to it. It allows you to take the music in new directions."
The Bobo Stenson Trio is at the John Field Room, NCH, Dublin on January 16th, and at Triskel Arts Centre, Cork, on January 17th, as part of the IMC piano trio series
