The saxophonist Mats Gustafsson and trumpeter Goran Kajfeš already seem to work at a maddening pace, major figures of the European avant-garde whose hands are all over the Swedish jazz scene, from Gustafsson’s indefatigable Fire! trio and his foundational work with GUSH which now stretches back more than three decades to the freeform theatrics of his quintet The End, while the versatile trumpeter is a longtime member of Angles and Nacka Forum, yet still finds the time to head out in another direction as the leader of the psychedelic ensemble Goran Kajfeš Tropiques.
Sometimes their penchant for collaboration and experimentation tends in the direction of big band, with last year’s buckling and swaying opus Echoes by Fire! Orchestra featuring a 43-strong cast of mostly Scandinavian musicians, including Kajfeš who also sat in with the Norwegian drummer Gard Nilssen whose 17-piece Supersonic Orchestra made a stellar debut on We Jazz Records. While there are countless examples of cross-pollination, both iterations of Fire! plus Angles, Nacka Forum and Goran Kajfeš Tropiques tend to be girded by the bass of Johan Berthling, with Fire! especially building upon swaggering riffs and steady repetitions while Berthling is also more than capable of rumbling in the background or laying out walking lines and cosmic grooves. Another familiar face is the bass clarinetist Christer Bothén, a member of the previous generation who played on the second Goran Kajfeš Tropiques album Into the Wild plus Echoes and the Alex Zethson record Terjes last year.
Describing the venerable Bothén as one of their heroes, for some time Gustafsson and Kajfeš have been looking to put together a smaller ensemble with a spiritual bent and a renewed focus on improvisation. So on Thursday night as part of the Umeå Jazzstudio’s autumn schedule, local jazz fans were treated to a world premiere as Cosmic Ear played to a full audience, extemporising over a handful of Don Cherry tunes while also elaborating a few original compositions.
Conceived as a quintet, Cosmic Ear seek broader horizons as they draw from the music of Don Cherry, his Codona trio with Collin Walcott and Naná Vasconcelos who released a hat-trick of self-titled albums on ECM between 1979 and 1983, and Frank Lowe who played memorably alongside Rashied Ali, Alice Coltrane and Cherry before branching out as a leader. In the process they embrace a fusion of secular and spiritual forms including the West African griot tradition, the Gnawa music of Morocco which was historically performed as part of all-night rituals comprising the burning of incense and the invocation of spirits through poetry recitals, call-and-response singing and ecstatic dance, and aspects of Latin American percussion in addition to Swedish folk music and the pantheon of European free jazz.
That portends a diverse array of instrumentation. Codona for instance featured Cherry not only on his familiar trumpet but on flutes, melodica and the donso ngoni or hunter’s harp, the traditional Malian griot medium, while Walcott whose untimely death in 1984 put an end to the trio brought to bear a wealth of learning in Hindustani classical music, playing the sitar and the tabla while turning just as adeptly to the Zimbabwean mbira, the hammered dulcimer or the timpani of his youth. Naná Vasconcelos meanwhile did much on the three Codona albums to introduce the berimbau to jazz, a single-string Angolan bowed instrument which became common in Brazilian music, used within the Candomblé religious tradition and the capoeira branch of martial arts.
In fact it was Christer Bothén who introduced Don Cherry to the donso ngoni, tutoring him in the instrument after Cherry and his partner Moki, the Swedish painter and textile artist, returned from the United States in 1970 and made their home out of an abandoned schoolhouse in the Skåne County area of Tågarp.
Bothén and the percussionist Bengt Berger toured with Don and Moki as they devised their Organic Music Theatre, a journey which culminated in 1972 with the record Organic Music Society, where Vasconcelos plays the berimbau and Bothén the donso ngono, while the 1974 album Eternal Now also features Bothén on that hunter’s harp as Berger expands his outlook to the mridangam and mbira, with both of the Swedes also playing Tibetan bells and tinkling away behind the piano. A live set entitled Organic Music Theatre: Festival de jazz de Chateauvallon 1972 which also features Vasconcelos on the berimbau and Bothén on the donso ngono was released by Blank Forms in 2021.
Cosmic Ear then comes into view as both a continent-spanning exercise in spiritualism and improvisation and as an intimate act of tribute for Bothén, who at the tender age of 83 years old sits at the epicentre of the lineup. He plays the donso ngoni alongside the bass clarinet, contrabass clarinet and piano, while Gustafsson picks up the tenor sax, flute and slide flute, an A-flat clarinet plus organ, harmonica and live electronics with Kajfeš provisionally on the trumpet and pocket trumpet but readily swapping over to the synthesizer and other electric effects. The Argentine-Swedish percussionist Juan Romero, a Kajfeš and Fire! Orchestra fellow traveller, steps in on the congas, berimbau and other accoutrements, while Kansan Zetterberg an Ivo Perelman and Jonas Kullhammar collaborator who has been a regular partner of Susana Santos Silva completes the quintet on bass.
The only problem as Cosmic Ear launched into a trio of Don Cherry pieces was that Bothén had come down with a fever, and was therefore absent as the rest of the band made their grand stage debut. Fortunately this multifaceted lineup can easily adapt, with Kansan Zetterberg dividing his time on the night between the double bass and an otherwise forlorn berimbau.
Between hushed mumbling and the occasional clinking of glasses, Cosmic Ear almost imperceptibly began with the low hum of Zetterberg’s bowed bass and some light mallet percussion. Kajfeš came in with a kind of bow-legged duck walk on the trumpet as Gustafsson dabbled in some live electronics, and before long the trio of Kajfeš, Zetterberg and Romero had found their groove as plucked bass and deft percussion made for an especially limpid rhythm section.
When Mats Gustafsson began to air out his flute and Romero switched to the congas, an Afro-Cuban rhythm vied with a reedy and grooving arabesque. Carrying the melody then blowing through his instrument in short and sharp bursts, the sound of the flute became coarser and more constricted, plotting a more angular course as the players unleashed a few hollers and hoots. Then Kajfeš returned with a sonorous trumpet line which swept its way between the greying skies and odorous lanterns or minarets.
A mid-pitched organ drone hovered like a mist over and through the composition, with slouching trumpet lines and watery percussion giving way to a free bass solo. Then as Zetterberg began jabbing away with his bow, Gustafsson and Kajfeš came out the other end through a celestial tread of synthesizers and rustling bell chimes. Gustafsson returned to his tenor saxophone and began to drive the tempo of the band, which appeared to be building towards its first big climax, but instead they held their ground and stayed firmly in the moment.
Improvising around Cherry’s compositions, they segued easily between pieces before the attentive and softly-lit crowd in Studion. With Kansan Zetterberg conjuring a thick low end on the bass, Juan Romero began playing berimbau and shakers. Gustafsson blowed raspberries and took long drags on his tenor sax and Kajfeš on the trumpet made celestial whorls or sputtering splotches. Together their steeped sound was redolent of ‘Love Train’ from Eternal Now or some of the more propulsive pieces on Organic Music Society, like ‘Elixir’ or the ‘Relativity Suite’ by Cherry, Bothén and Berger or the flowing and flute-blown ‘Hope’ and ‘Utopia & Visions’.
In its slower and swampier moments, for those wafting horns and the dexterity of its percussion, this first half of Cosmic Ear’s set also evoked ‘Tibet’ and those Codona albums, from the title track of the first record to the trumpet fanfares and woozy melodica of ‘Malinye’ and the brief ‘Lullaby’ of Codona 3. The double bassist William Parker has always cited Don Cherry as an influence, being introduced to the donso ngoni by the trumpeter back in 1975, and for a contemporary relation to the sort of sound which Cosmic Ear summoned here one need look no further than the Parker, Cooper-Moore and Hamid Drake collaboration from earlier this year entitled Heart Trio.
Zetterberg crouched into position on the ngoni and just as the quartet’s music became more marshy and distorted, a moment of tender harmony arose between Gustafsson’s flute and Kajfeš on the trumpet. With the fifth band member Bothén present in spirit, Zetterberg played a bounding motif with slinky overtones and then Romero was afforded a conga solo of sorts, accompanied by the trumpet before the donso ngoni found itself back in the heart of the mix. Saxophone and drums followed a winding rapids, buffeted from side to side and Gustafsson and Kajfeš pulled from both ends of the composition, making space for a rare cymbal crash as Cosmic Ear broke for a short intermission.
Cosmic Ear plan to play the European festival circuit next year, and will hopefully manage to incorporate a spell in the recording booth. The sympathy between the players and their ability on this night in chilly Umeå to fill in for any gaps comes as no surprise given their shared histories, even as they switched instruments in the blink of an eye, with Kajfeš stalking between his trumpet and synthesizer while Gustafsson turned to one side for some murky electronic processing or to grab a fresh piece of kit out of his bottomless bag.
With the Umeå native Gustafsson and Kajfeš passing on warm messages from Bothén, and the trumpeter vowing to find some semblance of cosmic balance which might ease the audience through the second half of their act, Cosmic Ear returned with an original composition dubbed ‘Father and Son’. Boasting a full ensemble from the outset, Kajfeš blew long lines on the trumpet as Gustafsson moved from the organ to the saxophone, with another coiling and swelling groove eventually ceding to some fine call and response.
At times the prevailing atmosphere was a swampy blues and at other times the composition felt almost regal as Gustafsson ramped up the distortion, with Kajfeš casting a swarm of spells from behind his synths. Then a kind of forsaken lull where the space was shaped by some spare mallet percussion developed into a duet between Romero and Gustafsson on the flute, while a combination of synthesizer and live effects soon added a layer of reverb as the playing of the quartet became more steep and sinuous. The vibrations of the donso ngoni then took centre stage as the other instruments began to fill in around its babbling resonances, with some cowbell adding to the agricultural air as Gustafsson trilled on his tenor.
Cosmic Ear closed their debut outing at Umeå Jazzstudio with a piece dedicated to Gustafsson’s frequent collaborator Sofia Jernberg, the experimental vocalist who beyond her roles with Cory Smythe, Nick Dunston and Alexander Hawkins has been a key component of Fire! Orchestra and is a founding member of The End.
Tagged with the title ‘Do It Again’, a few plangent bass plucks framed by brassy winds and twinkling bells made for a staggered opening section. Zetterberg’s short strums imbued the bass with a wiry character as Romero slipped in on the berimbau, and when Gustafsson pulled out a harmonica we were suddenly lurching down train tracks with each puff cutting through the air like a steam whistle.
Back on their horns, Kajfeš and Gustafsson once again began to frame the piece from opposite ends, pulling it apart as the trumpeter lagged behind with the melody. And there was still time for an encore for the steady crowd, another Don Cherry number which found the trumpet in especially fine fettle, while fluttering electronics conjured the feeling of being out in some shrubland or brush, with the tenor saxophone finally taking on more sustained notes while Kajfeš added strokes of colour. The result as with so much of this understated and inviting set was richly evocative, warm and somehow rousingly sober. However they develop and in whatever direction they tend, Cosmic Ear already feel like a trusted companion.
