Ystad 2017: Catching Up

Catching up is a noble ambition, but the quantity of music at the Ystad Sweden Jazz Festival and the tight scheduling make it all but impossible to be comprehensive. My notebook is overflowing with impressions. Here are brief reports on a few performances.

The festival’s opening concert was by the New York band The Rad Trads, whose blend of traditional, jazz, rock and folk music accounts for their name. They enlivened the ancient courtyard of Per Helsas Gård for an hour and a half before they led the festival’s celebratory opening parade through Ystad’s streets. In the photo below you see The Rad Trads. Directly below the upraised bell of Michael Fatum’s trumpet is Japanese alto saxophonist Yosuke Sato.

A couple of days later at Per Helsas Gård, the energetic Sato co-led a group with guitarist Jacob Fischer, rested from his Tuesday concert with Hans Beckenroth at the Klosterkyrkan. From the aural evidence, Sato’s playing seems to have been influenced equally by Cannonball Adderley and Phil Woods. He and Fischer opened with Adderley’s “Wabash,” then burned through several choruses of Sonny Rollins’ “Airegin,” a classic from Rollins’ tenure with Miles Davis in the 1950s. It must be tempting for a saxophonist with Sato’s technique to fully use it . He may have loaded at least one virtuosic run too many into his choruses on Johnny Mandel’s “Emily,” but apart from that it was a superb solo, as was the following one by Danish pianist Zier Romme Larson. The Fischer-Sato group took  the 1920 Al Jolson hit “Avalon” fast, Charlie Parker’s “Confirmation” faster than fast. The speedier tempos had the unexpected effect of encouraging Sato, pianist Larson and Fischer to introduce more space into their solos, a welcome development.

Angels At The Museum

The Swedish bassist David Carlsson presented his David’s Angels at the Konstmuseum in downtown Ystad. The angels were vocalist Sofie Norling, pianist Maggi Olin, the Danish drummer Michala Østergaard-Nielsen and as featured guest artist, Canadian trumpeter Ingrid Jensen.

 

A leader in her own right and often a member of Maria Schneider’s New York big band, Jensen was compelling with and without the electronic augmentation that she has made a specialty. Her use of loop effects and echo controlled by a foot pedal helped give Carlsson’s minor-key “Now That It’s Over” an eerie cast reminiscent of Middle Eastern music. She was all over the full range of the trumpet, often squeezing out sequences of notes in the extreme upper register. Carlsson is, to say the least, an active player.  His lines on the electric bass inflect the band’s work with jazz-rock undercurrents.

In a piece that Carlsson said was about “getting rid of stuff in your life,” Jensen and Norling performed voice-trumpet unison passages and Norling displayed her extremely personal way of scat singing. In her improvisation, Jensen quoted the title phrase of John Coltrane’s “A Love Supreme,” a fitting reference in this 50th anniversary year of the saxophone master’s death. Among the surprises delivered by David’s Angels was Jensen’s use of her trumpet as a percussion instrument. She lightly pounded the mouthpiece with the palm of her hand as she held the horn’s bell to a microphone. It created the desired popping sound, but—a warning to trumpet players—the action may cause you to cringe and wonder if she’s jamming the mouthpiece irretreivably into the horn. There is no video of the Ystad concert, but in a performance captured earlier at the Gustav Adolfs Church in Helsingborg you’ll get a sense of Norling’s flexible vocalizing, a bit of Jensen’s trumpet work including the mouthpiece whacking,  and the style of Carlsson’s band.  The piece is called “I’m Not Sorry At All.”