During my undergraduate years at Southampton in the late 1960s, the university’s Student Union Hall acquired quite a reputation for its regular music concerts. While the programme focused on exploratory rock groups such as, e.g., Pink Floyd, Cream, the Jeff Beck Group and Traffic, it also featured blues and the occasional avant-garde jazz gig: I still remember the shock I got when I first heard Roland Kirk in person! Many a moon later, the magnificent yet also intimate Turner Sims Concert Hall – which sits not that far from the old Union Hall and which last year celebrated its 50th anniversary – is testimony both to the far-sighted vision of the university authorities and the wide-ranging quality of the programming which has long marked the Turner Sims as the premier music venue on the south coast of England.
A double-concert Danish bill of the Cecilie Strange Quartet and the Astral Cinema ensemble drew a strong and most appreciative crowd. Here I have to apologise to Astral Cinema, an imaginative genre-slipping quartet featuring such distinguished musicians as Nikolai Torp Larsen (kyb) and Anders ‘A C’ Christensen (b) and whose eponymous 2024 release of 16 short, finely crafted and diversely characterful or “moody” pieces can be sampled on Bandcamp. On any other occasion I would have relished hearing their music live. But the impact on me of the magical opening set from Cecilie Strange (ts), Peter Rosendal (p), Thommy Andersson (b) and Jakob Høyer (d) was such that I simply couldn’t countenance the idea of hearing any further music that evening. So sorry, guys!
Following studies in Odense and New York with (respectively) saxophonists Hans Ulrik and Chris Cheek, Strange – who started playing saxophone at the age of 12 – cut her first album The Beginning for Gateway Music in December 2014. Featuring Stian Swensson (elg), Morten Christian Haxholm (b) and Rasmus Schmidt (d) plus guest spots from noted trumpeter Kasper Tranberg, it’s a date as lively as it is lovely: compare the relaxed groove of Whimsical Mind and the pin-bright and swinging Long Island Blues and Hallabadum with the ad libitum refections of When Winter Turns To Spring. While you sense that the young Strange had absorbed much from masters like Gordon and Getz, Coltrane and Shorter you also intuit a determined quest for a personal voice and vision.
Four years were to pass before Strange made her next album, the 2019 Blue released on Denmark’s April Records in 2021. It featured what Strange would call her dream team of fellow improvisers, the aforementioned Rosendal, Andersson and Høyer. The empathy between all was such that the session which had led to the Blue release also produced enough material for another album, Blikan [Shining] – also released in 2021 by April Records. The two further albums which Strange has to date released on this excellent label – Beyond and Beech (both reviewed favourably by me in JJ, following our late colleague Derek Ansell’s most positive reviews of Blue and Blikan) – feature the same musicians. See Jazz Journal’s Strange reviews.
In retrospect, something which Strange said in the sleeve note which DownBeat’s Cree McCree contributed to Blikan gets to the heart of what has come to make her music so distinctive in today’s divisive, war-torn and alienating world. Discussing the free improvisation that is her piece Wild Flower, Strange says “For me, music is a lot about space and silence. And the courage to put in the space and the silence. When you have all this you want to say with your instruments, it can be hard to put in the space. And that was a goal for both the albums [Blue, and, Blikan]. Put in space.”
And so it was at Turner Sims. The 55-minute programme began and concluded with two new Strange pieces, The Peace Traveller and The Waltz Of The Cranes, while the bulk of the set came from her four releases on April Records, including Hymn To Papa (from Blue), The Alices Of My Life (from Beyond) and Skrova Fyr (from Beech). If Strange’s fully rounded yet open, meditative and questing sound and supple rhythmic command were remarkable, so too was the sustained level of exemplary dynamic awareness and patient and spacious group interaction.
The historically minded might have detected echoes of, say, Lars Gullin and Jan Johansson, or even Jan Garbarek. But although Strange might share some of the poetics of Garbarek’s vision, she sounds nothing like him. Similarly, previous traces of the folk/jazz idiom in so much Nordic jazz of the past 50+ years were made fresh in a concert of surpassing quality.
Cecilie Strange Quartet, Turner Sims Concert Hall, University of Southampton, 26 September 2025
