Stenson has long been a top-class performer and recording artist, in all sorts of contexts. For years now, he and his Swedish compatriots Anders Jormin (b) and Jon Fält (d) have been developing something really special, based on a blend of original material (largely contributed by Jormin) and a subtle, jazz-inflected refiguring of the poetics of the classical world.
While Stenson can groove and burn with the best – exemplified by his work on Witchi-Tai-To, the album he cut in 1973 with Jan Garbarek, Palle Danielsson and Jon Christensen – the discipline of classical music has long meant much to him. In his early 20s Stenson studied with the German refugee and classical composer Werner Wolf Glaser (1910-2006) and in recent times, that side of things has surfaced increasingly in his art. A piece by Denmark’s Carl Nielsen featured on 2011’s Indicum while Contra La Indecisión of 2016 had material by Bartók, Mompou and Satie.
Sphere extends and intensifies this tendency. The album opens with Danish composer Per Norgård’s You Shall Plant A Tree and closes with a variation on this poised, patient and utterly beautiful meditation. There are two equally affecting pieces, Spring and Communion Psalm, from Sweden’s Sven-Erik Bäck (1919-1994), one (Valsette) from Sibelius, and one (Ky and beautiful madame Ky) from the Norwegian Alfred Janson (1937-2019) – whose own work bridged jazz and classical worlds.
The delicate and spacious quest that is Jormin’s Unquestioned Answer pays tribute to Charles Ives, with pizzicato and arco both featured. The piece sits as aptly as Kingdom Of Coldness (Jormin’s other original here, again underpinned by quietly magical arco and pizzicato figures) in what is, overall, an archetypal example of music of limpid poetry and a Nordic depth of mood, manifest through group interaction and improvisation recast at the highest level.
Likewise the import of swing, most immediately evident in the lovely flowing take on Jung-Hee Woo’s The Red Flower but a factor throughout this exceptional album: an album which cannot but recall the words that Norgård wrote in his youth to Sibelius, when he praised the lyrical strength of music that might encourage “the open human mind […] to lead a simpler […] and ineffably richer life.”
Discography
You Shall Plant A Tree; Unquestioned Answer – Charles Ives In Memoriam; Spring; Kingdom Of Coldness; Communion Psalm; The Red Flower; Ky And Beautiful Madame Ky; Valsette Op. 40/1; You Shall Plant A Tree (var.) (48.19)
Stenson (p); Anders Jormin (b); Jon Fält (d). Lugano, April 2022.
ECM 487 3808
