In the chill of last November I was in the audience for the debut outing of Cosmic Ear, a new quintet starring some of the leading lights of the Swedish jazz scene in the form of Mats Gustafsson, Goran Kajfeš, Christer Bothén, Juan Romero and Kansan Zetterberg.
Landing right on my doorstep just a few weeks after the 56th iteration of the city’s storied jazz festival, Bothén the spiritual figurehead of the group had come down with a fever, but the remaining quartet took to the stage of Umeå Jazzstudio where they performed a beguiling set inspired by the music of Don Cherry, as I heard traces of ‘Love Train’ and ‘Tibet’ from Eternal Now or some of the more propulsive pieces from Organic Music Society, plus snatches of songs like ‘Malinye’ and ‘Lullaby’ from Codona one-thru-three.
Mats Gustafsson, an Umeå native, is a restless proponent of free jazz, a doer and fixer who has collaborated prodigiously with the likes of Hamid Drake, Ken Vandermark and Peter Brötzmann and continues to lead the ensembles Fire! and The End, while his creaking drones and zephyr winds accompanied Joe McPhee’s second album of poetry I’m Just Say’n earlier this year and he has just recently announced Pivot, an impending album with Vandermark, Tomeka Reid and Chad Taylor.
The trumpeter Goran Kajfeš has racked up a slew of jazz and pop credits across the past three decades, and is a longtime member of Nacka Forum while leading Goran Kajfeš Tropiques, whose Tell Us proved one of the headiest trips of last year while in April he fulfilled a long-gestating collaboration with the electronic producer Andreas Tilliander, by way of the lurching rhythms and lunar abrasions of the Terry Riley-referencing In Cmin. Meanwhile the Argentine-Swedish percussionist Romero is a Sara Parkman, Fire! Orchestra and Kajfeš collaborator and the bassist Zetterberg has worked with Ivo Perelman and Jonas Kullhammar while routinely partnering the trumpeter Susana Santos Silva as one slice of a varied career.
At the age of 83, the clarinetist Christer Bothén is the senior member of Cosmic Ear, from an earlier generation of Swedish jazz than Gustafsson and Kajfeš and described by both as one of their heroes. In fact it is his early-seventies work with Don Cherry which lies at the heart of Cosmic Ear, with the two musicians crossing paths when Cherry and his wife Moki set up home in an abandoned schoolhouse in Tågarp in the south of Sweden, as Bothén taught the trumpeter and world fusion pioneer how to play the donso ngoni.
Bothén himself had got to grips with the donso ngoni or hunter’s harp, the traditional West African griot medium, during a stint in Mali at the turn of the seventies. He and the percussionist Bengt Berger then toured with Don and Moki as they devised their Organic Music Theatre, featuring on Cherry’s far-out albums Organic Music Society in 1972 and Eternal Now which was released on the Swedish-based label Sonet Records a couple of years later.
Bothén would go on to study gnawa music in Morocco in the late seventies and in 1982 he featured alongside Cherry and the bandleader Berger on the cult ECM classic Bitter Funeral Beer, before founding the fusion group Bolon Bata, whose equally cherished Trancedance was reissued for its fortieth anniversary by Black Truffle just last year.
A flurry of activity over the past decade has seen him join in with Mats Gustafsson’s Fire! Orchestra and NU Ensemble plus the Goran Kajfeš Subtropic Arkestra, while he has established a fruitful partnership with Vilhelm Bromander, featured on records by Sean McCann and the Ghosted trio of Johan Berthling, Andreas Werliin and Oren Ambarchi and released a couple of albums at the head of a Christer Bothén 3, the most recent of which starred Zetterberg on the bass and the vibraphonist and percussionist Kjell Nordesen and arrived under the title L’Invisible in early April.
Together those Don Cherry albums of the early-to-mid seventies – which featured a group of Swedish musicians including Bothén, Berger, Hans Isgren, Tage Sivén and the acclaimed tenor saxophonist Bernt Rosengren – plus Cherry’s three albums with his Codona trio provide the template for these new TRACES by Cosmic Ear, perhaps more in terms of instrumentation than rhythm and harmony.
Bothén played the donso ngoni and Naná Vasconcelos played the berimbau on Organic Music Society, with the Swedish musician returning to the hunter’s harp on Eternal Now as he and Berger plunked piano keys and clanged Tibetan bells while the percussionist also played the mbira and mridangam, a two-headed drum native to the Carnatic music of southern India, and Rosengren took a heralded turn on the Hungarian woodwind instrument the tárogató. A few years later the Cordona trio of Cherry, Collin Walcott and Vasconcelos assembled in a similar vein, more streamlined as Cherry played the donso ngoni alongside his trumpet while Walcott played a range of Hindustani instruments like the sitar and tabla plus the hammered dulcimer as Vasconcelos continued to introduce the jazz world to the berimbau, a single-string Angolan bowed instrument which became commonplace in Brazilian music, used both within the Candomblé religious tradition and the capoeira branch of martial arts.
On their debut album TRACES the quintet spread out the same assortment of instruments. At their premiere in Umeå it was Zetterberg who coopted the donso ngoni in Bothén’s absence, with the bassist now sharing the hunter’s harp with the group’s elder statesman as Bothén also plays the bass and contrabass clarinets and the piano. Gustafsson hits the high end on the A-flat clarinet and plays the flute, the slide flute and the trusty tenor saxophone, modifying his instruments through live processing while also taking spells on the organ and harmonica and Kajfeš as in Umeå divides his time between keyboards and trumpet, like Don Cherry, who sometimes played the pocket cornet, adding the pocket trumpet to his repertoire of brass and electronics. That leaves Romero who assumes the congas and berimbau in addition to shakers, drums and other small and large percussive instruments.
During ceremonies or festivities the donso ngoni – which typically boasts six strings, is covered in goatskin and has a long neck which extends through a gourd resonator – is often accompanied by the karignan, a serrated metal tube which is scraped by a metal nail or stick, in manner and sound landing somewhere between an agogô bell or the rattle and ratchet of a güiro. On TRACES that role is fulfilled by Marianne N’Lemwo, a member of Bolon Bata who played on Trancedance and Mother Earth and here joins the Cosmic Ear quintet on the karignan as a special guest.
The album opener ‘Father and Son’ commences through Zetterberg’s bounding bass, with Gustafsson on the tenor saxophone and Kajfeš on the trumpet plus some alloy percussion around the edges, a steeped procession with the electronic processing of the tenor adding a wispy trail to the entourage, like an alien transmission emanating from the depths of a well. As the bass finds its groove it is surrounded by claves and shakers and the scratches of the karignan, with snatches of slide flute and the bass clarinet cohering to make for a lively introductory piece.
Romero accompanies the bass on the congas and what sounds like handclap percussion adds steady moments of emphasis, urging on the ensemble and upping the tempo as the tenor saxophone squalls and gales. Beyond the cosmic or fusion trappings this is jazz served up straight, no chaser, a real bracer, raw and brisk as the trumpet comes back in to tangle with the saxophone like two ribbons snaking in the wind.
‘TRACES of Brown Rice’ interprets the album opener and title piece from Don Cherry’s iconic 1975 album and turns that tune inside out. The underlying melody of the original was carried by a couple of electric pianos and Verna Gillis’s vocal coos, a slender and ululating bedding for an acidic rhythm section, comprised of Bunchie Fox’s electrified bongos and Charlie Haden’s wah-wah bass while Cherry hisses the song’s title and Frank Lowe wails away on his tenor saxophone.
Cosmic Ear instead offer a more reedy and sticky take on the piece, which opens through what sounds like synthesised water droplets, whose plunks morph into a spacey bassline of sorts as hollow winds and the springy berimbau start to spread out and build. As played by Romero, the wiry berimbau takes on the role of Haden’s wah-wah pedal, subverting the acidic bite and shamanism of the original for something more portentous and even menacing, as sputtering lips, siren alarms and revving engines which slip in and out of musicality plus the karignan add to the ambiance, contrasting with the winding reeds and winds before Cosmic Ear retreat from whence they came.
That charming ‘Love Train’ which I first heard down in Studion gets a fuller treatment on TRACES, as Bothén who played on the original and is therefore charting familiar terrain opens with a fine piano solo, glimmering and passionate and holding the space. After a few roiling keys, congas and sloshing rattles and shakers sketch out the rhythm of the piece, as Gustafsson who alternates between flute and tenor takes a sinuous and river-bent course with a few shrill moments, soon joined by the trumpet which arcs above his woodwinds in its role as bugle or beacon. There are all manner of small percussions dotted throughout the composition and Gustafsson engages in some rasping gusts on the tenor saxophone, as the middle section also abounds in shrugging shakers and twinkling chimes. Eschewing the celestial yearning of the original which featured Tibetan bells and Rosengren on the tárogató, this ‘Love Train’ is swampy and searching, with few ensembles able to develop and ride out a groove quite like this.
On the other hand ‘Right Here Right Now’ is perhaps a reference to Cherry’s relatively unheralded 1977 effort Hear & Now, a bridge between Brown Rice and the Ornette Coleman riff Old and New Dreams. A race between the percussion and the donso ngoni saturated by misty synths opens out into a series of butting contests and freeform solos on the saxophone and bass clarinet, warping time and resolutely shrugging off a few dolorous sentiments to maintain its driving and sometimes bristling character, adorned by honks and chimes and some eerie, overhanging drones from Kajfeš who operates from behind the synths.
‘Do It (Again)’ with its dedication to Sofia Jernberg – the experimental vocalist and frequent Fire! Orchestra and The End collaborator – begins with the ominous buzz of the contrabass clarinet. Moister reeds and the sounds of running water begin to shape the composition as if by a process of erosion, carving out these little rills or treads. A steady drumbeat keeps the piece somewhat grounded, as do the rustle of seed shell shakers and the wiry reverberations of the berimbau, before the song’s vaporous airs are usurped in the second half by the more staggered and bounding phrases of the donso ngoni and double bass. It’s a marshy closing feature until the congas and the bird calls of the woodwinds add a certain swagger to TRACES over the record’s last couple of minutes.
In contrast to the vinyl, digital and compact disc versions of the album add ‘TRACES of Codona and Mali’ as the sixth and final track, a blend of inquisitive and elasticated berimbau with wind and trumpet fanfares before Zetterberg’s bass adds a loping horizontality to the lofty elegies and probing cries. Winds and brass deepen and multiply across the second half of the composition, adding the piquancy or pungency of civet to the enveloping musk.
An engrossing album which is a credit to the character of the musicians and their indelible chemistry as a unit, TRACES is the second tribute to Don Cherry in a matter of weeks, following on the heels of Journey to Nabta Playa by Angel Bat Dawid and Naima Nefertari. A powerful meditation on memory, mythology and ancestral science which hones in on the calendar circle in the Nubian desert, once used to track the summer solstice, the album offers a brief take on ‘Bishmillah’ by Don Cherry and a new arrangement of the David Ornette Cherry composition ‘Burial: String Quartet in E Minor’, with the pianist Nefertari the late instrumentalist’s niece as well as an archivist and curator for the Estate of Moki Cherry at Tågarp.
