Bobo Stenson - Inner Vision

Cantando, the latest release by Bobo Stenson on the ECM label, thoughtfully articulates the road travelled by the Swedish pianist since his emergence in jazz in the 1960s. On it, he reveals his lifelong love of jazz and classical music and his interest in music beyond both that has characterised his career. It’s the fifth instalment in a continuum of trio albums that began in 1996 with Reflections, and is the direct expression of a musician who places great premium on melody. “It’s not that we look for pieces [for the trio] specifically,” he says down the line from his apartment in Stockholm. “It’s the music that has to come across, let’s say. You like melodies, and you think, ‘We can do something with that.’”

For almost 40 years Stenson has been at the forefront of European jazz, performing with some of its greatest names as well as well as some of the greatest American stars, creating several classic recordings along the way, as well as several in his own right.

Reflections, for example, received the two highest awards that a jazz record can win in Sweden, a Grammy and a Golden Record Award, and the three trio albums that followed, War Orphans (1998), Serenity (2000), a two CD set, and Goodbye (2005), all with bassist Anders Jormin, received unanimous international acclaim, with Svensk Musik describing Serenity as, “a milestone in the progress of modern jazz.”

On Cantando, compositions by Alban Berg and the Czech composer Petr Eben co-exist alongside pieces by Don Cherry, Ornette Coleman and the standard ‘Love, I’ve Found You,’ recorded by both Miles Davis and Wynton Kelly. Equally, Stenson’s openness to diverse musical influences is reflected by the inclusion of an Astor Piazzolla tango and Cuban melody by the folk-protest singer Silvio Rodriguez. Like all the music on the album they are thoughtfully re-configured in a personal musical language and become Bobo Stenson’s music – music of haunting depth and lyricism.

Reflecting on his choice of material, he explains: “[Bassist] Anders [Jormin] brought ‘Song of Ruth’. He had played with an organ player at his university, and I had never heard of [Czech] composer Petr Eben, but he is quite a big name in the organ music world, who died a year-and-a-half ago. So we tried it out and Manfred [Eicher, the boss of ECM records] liked it very much, so we included two versions of that piece! Then we have Rodriguez [a Cuban folk/protest singer], these things happen, you just come across them like the Piazolla piece [‘Chiquilin de Bachin’]. ‘Liebesode’ is by Alban Berg. Since we are interested in classical music, we always bring some to the band, and we have actually done a Berg [piece] before, we did ‘Die Nachtigall’ [The Nightingale] on Serenity [from 1999], for instance.”

This is an extract from Jazzwise Issue #123 to read the full feature and receive a Free CD Subscribe Here ...