Umeå, a small city on the northeast coast of Sweden which lies around 600 kilometres from Stockholm and wears a subarctic climate, with long and dark winters but warm summers imbued with the glow of a midnight sun, culturally punches several divisions above its weight class.
Known for its birch trees and clean air, this fact owes partly to the presence of Umeå University, which was founded in 1965 and has largely driven the growth of the city, plus the adjacent though longer-standing university hospital. Beyond the number of people it employs and the diverse cadre of young people it brings to the region, the university’s arts campus in a picturesque location by the Ume river now hosts the internationally renowned Bildmuseet, which has carried exhibitions by such acclaimed artists and practitioners as Tracey Rose, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, Ana Mendieta, John Akomfrah and Faith Ringgold, and the prestigious and selective Institute of Design which has been consistently recognised as offering one of the best design educations in the world.
The sculpture park in Umedalen can boast pieces by Louise Bourgeoise, Anish Kapoor and Antony Gormley while the open-air Gammlia at Västerbottens museum shows the region as it was in a bygone era. In the realm of sport more wizened denizens might point to the faded lustre of Umeå IK, once the home of Marta and still one of the most successful clubs in Champions League history, or to its lauded skiers like the Olympic gold medalist Anja Pärson and its status as the new fixed host of Rally Sweden, the only round of the World Rally Championship to be held on snow.
Through various iterations, the city continues to host an annual film festival. As though to cement its standing, for 2014 the city was chosen as a European Capital of Culture, which brought a redesign of the waterfront and Väven, a new cultural centre which serves as a mixed-use community hub. Yet when it comes to music life in Umeå is especially storied and vibrant, as the city is home to Norrlandsoperan with its own symphony orchestra, the museum Guitars with its collection of exclusive axes including a Fender Broadcaster and Gibson Flying V from back in 1958, and musicians from the progressive metal stalwarts Meshuggah to the electropop singer Tove Styrke, though Umeå is perhaps most intimately associated with its hardcore scene of the early nineties, which was headlined by the influential vegan and straight edge band the Refused.
Last but by no means least is the Umeå Jazz Festival, a fixture of the cultural scene ever since it was founded back in 1968 by Lars Lystedt, a trombonist and longtime DownBeat correspondent who led his own swing bands and the Umeå Big Band, but who is perhaps best known for the cherished 1963 album by his sextet entitled Jazz Under the Midnight Sun.
Lystedt, who died in March of 2022 at the age of 96 years old, could recall his efforts to attract some of the early names to the jazz festival through free suppers and fancy hotel suites, but Umeå was already a jazz town with local groups providing the soundtrack to the city’s dances while a couple of military regiments were armed with their own brass bands. Louis Armstrong even paid Umeå a visit in 1959, performing with his All-Stars at the newly inaugurated Sporthallen, with pictures of Satchmo cupping the snow in faux astonishment and unleashing his familiar grin, clasping his trumpet in one hand against the blanketed whiteout of the old airfield at Olofsfors.
The great bebop tenor saxophonist Dexter Gordon was the first big name to grace the new festival, which over the course of its first ten years drew a veritable who’s who of jazz to the north of Sweden, including such illustrious figures as Monica Zetterlund, Sun Ra & His Solar Arkestra, the Charles Mingus Quintet, the Dave Brubeck Trio, Paul Desmond, Gerry Mulligan, Duke Ellington, Oscar Peterson and B.B. King, Count Basie and his orchestra with the blues shouter ‘Big Joe’ Turner, the divine Sarah Vaughan, the ‘King of Swing’ Benny Goodman and the Chicago blues legend Muddy Waters.
The eighties continued in the same vein with performances by Sonny Rollins, Dizzy Gillespie, Blossom Dearie, Toots Thielemans, Pharoah Sanders, Ella Fitzgerald and Chick Corea, a period capped in 1985 when the festival and the municipality pulled out all the stops to secure Miles Davis, who reportedly arrived from Paris with a 22-page rider before performing a headlining set of mostly period fare from albums like You’re Under Arrest and Rubberband at Sporthallen, with Lars Lystedt’s ensemble as the supporting act.
The festival has continued to attract some of jazz’s most esteemed performers alongside local veterans and Swedish crowdpleasers plus a healthy smattering of world musicians and aspiring stars. From the likes of John Scofield, Cassandra Wilson, Roscoe Mitchell and the trio of Geri Allen, Charlie Haden and Paul Motian in the late eighties to the Art Ensemble of Chicago, Ornette Coleman with Prime Time, Lester Bowie, Enrico Rava and Nina Simone, and from Bill Frisell, Joshua Redman, Henry Threadgill, Christian McBride and Wayne Shorter to a string of younger talents like Vijay Iyer, Julian Lage, Ambrose Akinmusire, Mary Halvorson, Lakecia Benjamin and Sylvie Courvoisier, every year brings something different whether for jazz aficionados and curious listeners or for those who want to stomp their feet and dance.
In 2018 the festival celebrated its fiftieth anniversary, and in 2021 the longstanding artistic director Lennart Strömbäck opted to step down after some 32 years. Jonas Knutsson is the current artistic director of Umeå Jazz Festival, a saxophonist who from his first forays with the fusion group Cabazz to his collaborations with Lena Willemark, Ale Möller, Enrico Rava, Mats Öberg, Johan Norberg and Lisa Lestander has imbued his music with folk idioms.
Knutsson can remember volunteering at the festival in his youth, where he was a flower boy for Sarah Vaughan and served sandwiches to Muddy Waters. With the festival now firmly entrenched at Umeå Folkets Hus, although several restaurants and theatre spaces serve to provide pop-up venues around town, today he leads the programme alongside the project coordinator Helena Karlsson with a healthy team of sound engineers and stagehands, visual artists, photographers and volunteers.
As a prelude or overture to the festival proper, on Wednesday evening Umeå Folkets Hus played host to the traditional concert by Midgårdsskolan’s young musicians, while as part of the autumn slate of Thursday night jazz performances, the studio welcomed a familiar face in the drummer Paal Nilssen-Love whose freewheeling Circus draws inspiration from the music of Ethiopia, Mali, Senegal and Colombia but most especially Brazil. Then on Friday afternoon the Staffan Öberg Nonet kicked off proceedings, which from all the way back in 1980 continues to indulge its passion for the repertoire of Charles Mingus, and features in Sten Öberg on drums and the saxophonist Lars-Göran Ulander not only two original members of the band but two of the players on that now almost fabled early-sixties Jazz Under the Midnight Sun album.
My own excursion began with a group of musicians playing under the auspices of the saxophonist Daniel Erdmann, who has led the Velvet Revolution since 2015 and over the past few years has engaged in a series of celebrated records and performances with the pianist Aki Takase. For his latest project, which was commissioned last year by the festivals jazzahead! and Jazzdor plus the network AJC, the saxophonist has styled an ensemble around the theme of ‘Thérapie de Couple’ or couples therapy with the troubled participants no less than the nations of Germany and France themselves.
Erdmann says that every now and then, ‘the engine of Europe has a marital crisis’. Drawing from a mix of German and French musicians, his Thérapie de Couple sextet features Hélène Duret on the clarinet and bass clarinet, Théo Ceccaldi on the violin, Vincent Courtois on the cello, Felix Henkelhausen on the double bass and Eve Klesse on drums. I was unfamiliar with the ensemble, which proved a revelation as belying Erdmann’s besuited, somewhat academic and even faintly Lynchian appearance, they produced bluesy drones carried by the slow bowing of the cello, with moments of whimsy from the clarinet and altogether a real sense of swing.
Studion, the weekly stage for jazz at Umeå Folkets Hus, has a club atmosphere that is celebratory while conducive to deep listening. In this environment Daniel Erdmann’s Thérapie de Couple played mid-century airs with a contemporary atmosphere. The sextet are yet to set their sound to wax, but over the course of their performance dedicated with a degree of irony songs to the memory of the former French president François Mitterrand and West German chancellor Helmut Kohl, who Erdmann described as ‘brothers in arms’ as he invoked their holding of hands in Verdun, a symbol of the long postwar rehabilitation of Franco-German relations, then to the popular French comedian Louis de Funès.
In the first instance a kind of dirge was offset by a walking line on the saxophone, which gave way to an outstanding cello solo, while for the piece inspired by de Funès – with Erdmann directing the audience to the 1966 film Le grand restaurant and a famous scene where the actor, who plays the owner of a Parisian restaurant, recites in German his recipe for potato soufflé – a duet between the bass and drums was carried away by the swelling of winds and strings, as the especially animated Ceccaldi played a folksy violin solo with growing intensity. The ensemble flowed together with ease while leaving ample space for each of the soloists, as a series of slides and descents led by the clarinet and saxophone concluded the piece.
Ale Möller’s band wound up Xenomania, a work in four parts which draws inspiration from the Greek amanes singer Barba Thodoros, the Baul guru Tarak Khyapa, the Dalarna fiddler Röjås Jonas and the single-stringed riti player Gibril Bah, while Caroline & the Invisible Orchestra prepared to weave fairytales down in Lilla Äpplet.
Meanwhile I turned my attention to the violinist Manoj Baruah and the tabla player Suranjana Ghosh who had set up a small bed or divan inside the snug Tonsalen studio, where they sat crosslegged and performed long, hypnotising drones. Schooled in the traditions of Hindustani classical music, Suranjana Ghosh in particular has developed a reputation across Sweden for turning her instrument to many forms, including folk music, flamenco and jazz as she has performed with the likes of Goran Kajfeš and Erik Steen, yet here they unfolded steadily pulsing raga as Baruah bowed elegantly while Suranjana laid out the groove on her tabla before slipping into more plosive and carbonated tones.
After thanking the audience, Suranjana said that the duo would close with a piece of ‘light classical music’ and noted that she first needed to retune her tabla, which was ‘very confused’ by the cold weather. Baruah then elaborated the mostly minor scale melodies of the piece through a series of vibrato and slides. Yet after a moment of hesitation they managed to tease out just enough time for one more song, a folk tune from the state of Assam in northeastern India, which bore a bluesy inflection as the audience offered handclap accompaniment to its brisk rise and fall.
The flamenco guitarist Steen, who first performed at the Umeå Jazz Festival as a percussionist all the way back in the seventies, and his fellow six-string specialist Erik Weissglas provided the soundtrack for those drinking or dining at Freja, a pop-up bistro on the mezzanine, as the bassist and composer Eva Kruse led her quintet down to Äpplet for a performance of their 2020 record New Legend. A long line began to snake up the stairs from Studion for the singer-songwriter Loney Dear, who was accompanied on vibraphone, bass and drums for a rendition of songs from his most recent album All Things Go, which was released at the beginning of the year.
But two of the festival’s favourite sons were getting ready for a special display in Tonsalen, as the saxophonists Mats Gustafsson and Lars-Göran Ulander extemporised the art of the solo. Ulander has been a mainstay of the Swedish jazz scene ever since those sixties sessions as part of the Lars Lystedt Sextet, a totem especially for musicians from the north as he has spent most of his life in Västerbotten, while the Umeå native Gustafsson first performed at the festival as a young man back in 1987 with the guitarist Christian Munthe as Two Slices of Electric Car.
This year’s festival served as something of a tribute to Ulander, who performed here, as part of the Staffan Öberg Nonet and later in the evening with Nacka Forum. Meanwhile Gustafsson – a bastion of the European free jazz scene and a regular visitor to Chicago, who has worked closely with Peter Brötzmann, Barry Guy, Ken Vandermark and Hamid Drake plus the likes of Sonic Youth, Merzbow and Neneh Cherry, while serving to cap recent years of the Umeå Jazz Festival through the freeform theatrics of his quintet The End and a stirring translation of Echoes by his Fire! Orchestra – was almost as evident on the ground as he was on the stage at this year’s festival, a fixer and joiner who greased the wheels and was prone to popping up even semi-unexpectedly.
Inside the intimate Tonsalen the pair engaged in a few fond reminiscences, for instance on some of their early collaborative performances at the old Bildmuseet up on Gammlia. Then they began to exchange solos which were backed by the tick-tick-tick of an egg timer, whose own ringing blows cut short their often spellbinding improvisations. Gustafsson on the baritone saxophone attacked his instrument ever so deftly, with gusty blows as the air pushed through and around his reed offset by the percussive aplomb of his fingering, while Ulander on the alto saxophone was more sonorous and mellifluous.
As Gustafsson traded between the saxophone and flute, at times his playing was so frantic and aerated that you could hear every gasp or gulp of breath. Finally they played a duet which was billed as two overlapping solos, meeting in drags and finding a sense of shared purpose in some of their more plaintive moments, before Gustafsson again swapped his saxophone for a flute and blew gusts down empty corridors, teasing an elegant and faintly burnished close yet the egg timer was not done, so they played on to a torrid, frantic and impassioned climax.
Breathing new life into his longstanding orchestra, the Laurent Dehors project OK Boomer took to the stage in Idun, the festival’s largest and grandest theatre. Embellishing his Tous Dehors with a group of freshly graduated younger musicians, as the various members of his ensemble gradually made their way out onto the stage, Dehors joked ‘in their own groups they’re never late’. Collectively they produced a full-bodied sound with notes of dissonance through the trombones, the euphonium and the tuba, lively and headstrong but still jaunty.
With the leader Dehors playing the harmonica and bagpipes beyond his usual saxophone and clarinet, some of their songs were imbued with these dizzy fairground organ melodies, while flutes and piccolos aired with the shrill resonance of a penny whistle. Eliot Foltz and Franck Vaillant on keyboards, drums and electronic percussion clanged like so many pots and pans, as their synthetic treatments laid the ground for some of the funkier strands of jazz fusion. Driving melodies were interrupted by the quacking sound of the horns, as the other instruments eked out elaborations on the fowl theme, with OK Boomer offering a decidedly quirky and upbeat diversion on this first full night of the festival.
The acclaimed singer and composer Lina Nyberg was last up in Studion on Friday night, as she unveiled her twenty-fourth studio album Lost in the Stars as a tribute to the songs of Kurt Weill. Down in the lush and even somewhat lascivious Äpplet, a versatile banquet venue with a full bar along one side of the room and full-length glass mirrors, Nacka Forum were also rolling out their latest offering, which was recorded at the legendary Atlantis Studios in Stockholm – the home of ABBA as well as recordings by everyone from The Cardigans, Roxette and The Hives to Quincy Jones and Elvis Costello – and marks their twenty-fifth anniversary.
A marquee birthday and a record release party, Nacka Forum played songs from their new album Peaceful Piano. Inspired from the outset by the visionary language of Sun Ra and Don Cherry, the quartet has remained relatively stable over the course of these past twenty-five years, with the saxophonist Jonas Kullhammar, the trumpeter Goran Kajfeš and the bassist Johan Berthling joined by Kjell Nordeson on drums until 2013, when he was replaced by the Danish percussionist Kresten Osgood. Special moments call for special measures, and just as he did in the studio, Lars-Göran Ulander stepped in here for a few of the tracks, along with the tuba player Heiða Karine Jóhannesdóttir Mobeck who has accompanied Anja Lauvdal and been part of both Fire! Orchestra and the Trondheim Jazz Orchestra.
Kullhammar, the leader of the group on stage and the composer of three of the eight songs on Peaceful Piano, explained while wearing a three-tiered cake on his head that Nacka Forum were ready to provide their audience with a meditative and stress-free evening. They commenced proceedings with the Peaceful Piano opener ‘Graden på Moset’ before ‘Othello’ bridged the gap between the bal-musette and an arabesque, with Berthling’s walking pattern on the bass both swaggering and retreating. Kullhammar played artfully the piccolo flute and bell chimes made for a glistening close to the piece. Elsewhere ‘A Crank of Mu’ barrelled out of the gates with Osgood letting off firecrackers from behind the drum kit, with a plethora of winds as Kullhammar and Kajfeš took turns airing out their saxophone and trumpet.
According to Kullhammar the band had long dreamed of playing at Umeå Jazz Festival, but they made sure to give Lars-Göran Ulander his flowers as the wily veteran emerged on stage with Heiða Mobeck in tow for the celebratory ‘Saxnäs Superman’. After an introductory solo on the saxophone the whole band came together imbued by the rich earthy tones of the tuba, and as they began to strut it was the tuba which provided the bedrock and backbeat as Kullhammar and Ulander exchanged short, interlinked and increasingly wild runs while Kajfeš played the congas. ‘Saxnäs Superman’ sputtered and sagged and billowed and burst but never became untethered, as the bellows of a tuba solo gave way to Kajfeš now playing a retro synth, whose vibratos and oscillations sounded like an old Doctor Who theme before Nacka Forum returned to their own motif, while drawing a few snatches from the Peaceful Piano closer ‘Lilla Maria’.
Between songs a scamp in the audience requested the Tracy Chapman folk ballad ‘Baby Can I Hold You’, to which Kullhammar replied ‘No, my wife is here’. A muted and silvery opening was punctuated by a crashing swell of keys, but no percussion as Osgood had swapped his drums for the piano stool. After a long gestation period an Afro-Cuban rhythm finally swung into life, carried by the two horns and Kajfeš who was back on his congas. Once again Mobeck’s tuba joined Berthling’s bass in setting a template for the piece, with Kullhammar tracing the motif before spiralling off in all directions on what sounded like a medley of older tunes with ‘LG’s Lament’.
While the eight tracks on Peaceful Piano are not always defined much less circumscribed by their composers, the album bears some of the best bits from their respective works, like the swirling melodies, watery tones and limpid chord progressions of Goran Kajfeš Tropiques on their standout hypno-jazz album Tell Us from earlier this year, or the sauntering basslines which Berthling weaves to such stunning effect, undergirding the new Fire! album Testament with Gustafsson and Andreas Werliin or more spectrally and less agriculturally the second volume of Ghosted with Werliin and Oren Ambarchi. On record Kullhammar plays a breadth of instruments from the sopranino, soprano, tenor and bass saxophones to the Hungarian táragotó, piccolo and slide whistle, while on stage too he drives the ensemble.
After a short speech laden with effusive praise for Lars-Göran Ulander, the band turned to Osgood’s composition ‘Grønland’, a nocturne. An ascending pattern on the bass and a burnished trumpet solo gave way to a descending motif on the sax, one last hug goodnight before Nacka Forum indulged in a final spurt by way of an encore.
Increasingly the Umeå Jazz Festival skirts its borders and sprawls out into the rest of the city, with jam sessions, jazz kissa and other listening events involving the likes of Erik Steen, Prins Emanuel and Golden Ivy taking place this year at the Guitars museum, Facit Bar and Ögonblicksteatern. In addition the venues of Umeå Folkets Hus played host to family concerts, wine lunches and even yoga classes which were conducted to an accompaniment of live music.
A panel discussion hosted by IMPRA, a nonprofit which aims to support female, transgender and non-binary musicians who are active in the improvisational scene, brought together the philosophy student and IMPRA member Ruth Pahlbäck plus the festival participants Erika Angell, Elise Einarsdotter and Lina Nyberg. Then a conversation in the cinema and lecture hall Miklagård between Mats Gustafsson, Lars-Göran Ulander, Sten Öberg and Roger Bergner of the Centre for Swedish Folk Music and Jazz Research considered creativity in Swedish jazz between the years 1965 and 1977 plus some of the latest releases by the archival and new music imprint Caprice Music, including the Ulandar retrospective Öppet Två.
Nicole Mitchell – the esteemed flautist and composer who previously chaired the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, a catalyst of the avant-garde since its formation in 1965, with some of her more recent works including collaborations with Tomeka Reid, Mike Reed, Alexander Hawkins and Ballaké Sissoko – was scheduled to give a talk in Miklagård on the theme of ‘Colliding Dystopic with Utopic Visions’, an elaboration on her book The Mandorla Letters which was published in 2022. Unfortunately she was forced to cancel on short notice due to illness.
That reduced Saturday afternoon’s intended trio performance in Studion with Mitchell, Sofia Jernberg and Mette Rasmussen to a duo. Of course the vocalist Jernberg – a member of The End and frequent collaborator with Fire! Orchestra and the Trondheim Jazz Orchestra, whose recent appearances include the Cory Smythe album Smoke Gets In Your Eyes after Jerome Kern and Otto Harbach, an ‘object lesson in the transmutation of weather and grief into sound’, a duo album rooted in traditional songs from Ethiopia, Armenia and Sweden with Alexander Hawkins, plus a jabbering, teeth-chattering and sometimes deliriously high-pitched outing as one of the four voices on Nick Dunston’s Afro-surrealist anti-opera COLLA VOCE – and the ever sought after Rasmussen, one of the leading contemporary names in improvisational and genre-bending jazz, were more than up to the task. But they were still buttressed in the middle of their set by the everywhere man Mats Gustafsson, who added his baritone to a couple of blasts.
Jernberg has been a regular at the festival for the best part of two decades, performing alongside Cecilia Persson, Trondheim Jazz Orchestra, Hawkins and The End, while Rasmussen was making her Umeå Jazz Festival debut. And the experimental mavericks were in fine fettle as Jernberg opened the set with a series of high-pitched vocalisations which bordered on ululations, before Rasmussen attained a spiritual register, with a bit of truth seeking redolent of Albert Ayler and his marching band.
Through a few trills Rasmussen’s alto saxophone gradually blew quieter, as Jernberg sang from the back of her throat and clacked her tongue, at once reaching the highest peaks of her soprano, which can stretch from dramatic to the most supple coloratura, then sputtering from the glottis through to the blown raspberries of her lips. Rasmussen blew only air, with the duo sounding to half-quote a popular phrase like an old man slurping soup at a deli or a clowder of cats who are consoling one another over a squashed tail.
Their second improvisation fell into a bluesier groove, with Rasmussen managing to get a bassier tone out of her saxophone as she played with a squawk and a stank. Then Mats Gustafsson joined them on stage, with Sofia Jernberg sounding inflicted, like all of the air being squeezed out of a balloon, as Gustafsson engaged in a mission to eke the smallest sounds out of his big and gritty baritone, through shorts squibs and sudden gusts.
Like a karate master or ninja training with pads, Jernberg emitted a hi-hi-hi as Gustafsson swapped his saxophone for a flute. There was more simpatico sputtering and the odd growl, with Rasmussen briefly turning her alto saxophone into a slide whistle before she wielded a set of bells on a rope with the slouch of shackles or sea shells. She could therefore contribute on percussion while continuing to play her saxophone one-handed, and as the winds became more resonant she hopped up and down while Jernberg sounded off like a foghorn as the trio reached a climax.
Back as a duo, they offered a rework of a piece from the new album by ØKSE. Helmed by Rasmussen, the quartet also features the turntablist Val Jeanty, the drummer Savannah Harris and the multi-instrumentalist Petter Eldh who completes the lineup on bass, samplers and synthesizers, with four rappers including ELUCID and billy woods coming along for the ride on what is undoubtedly the Brooklyn hip hop label Backwoodz Studioz’ furthest foray into free jazz to date. A blues with cooing choral vocals, their interpretation took on a nautical air as Jernberg let out her longest cry, sounding a bit like the Inuk throat singer Tanya Tagaq. So this piece was a lament of sorts but one which saw the dead as still living, with the power to raise them up for one last dance.
Rasmussen stuck on a mute which visibly trembled as it let out a dampened rattle, a voice in itself. Then after a spurt from a bird whistle, Jernberg muttered ‘smile’ which was the first full word she had enunciated through the course of the set. What followed was a full and breathy rendition of the song ‘Smile’ by Nat King Cole, sang with real warmth and tenderness yet barely above a whisper before she and Rasmussen traded shouts of ‘smile’ which echoed across the stage. The song became more staccato, heaving and jerky, ‘smile though your’ with no heart a breaking as this captivating duet screeched to a halt.
If Mats Gustafsson had to scram during the set, it was because he was the ringmaster or master of ceremonies for an innovative experiment at six o’clock. 1+1+1 gave individual festival attendees the chance to watch an act up close and in person for sixty seconds, hence the title: one audience member for one act for one minute.
Judging by the queue which stretched outside the door of the small lecture hall, the event surely turned into more of a group activity before the session was up. But as I was one of the first couple of dozen in line I was able to watch the revolving cortege of audience members and musicians, from solo acts to full ensembles, before taking a seat for a descending peal of distorted guitar.
That left enough time for some of Mamie Jotax, the duo of Camille Maussion and Carmen Lefrançois on saxophones, flutes and vocals. Describing their project as a ‘joyful syllabic chimera, born from a random sneeze and a pinch of onomatopoeia’, their penchant is for a mix of composed and improvised music with a storytelling bent. Their bright melodies and the winnowing of their winds sometimes gave way to the meowing of cats, which was rendered both vocally and instrumentally, and aquatic tones as though they had stumbled across a sunken city in need of resuscitation.
For the encore, which began on the soprano saxophone, they glanced anxiously about the stage as though tracing the sound of a swarm of bees or perhaps utilising their own echolocation system. Playful and inquisitive, they followed one another through bustling streets until they reached a collective dead end. Then whether by design or necessity, Lefrançois set down her soprano for a flute and through the throng the traces of a folk motif started to appear, with Maussion blowing around it in a manner both impish and cinematic, gilded and pastoral until the last run and finish.
Mamie Jotax always kept the audience guessing, with vocalisations serving to interrupt, emphasise or otherwise stand in for their instruments. They were the perfect choice for a half-hour set the following morning in Tonsalen billed as ‘Music for very small ears’, an introduction to the wide world of jazz which was targeted at infants, toddlers and children aged between two months and five years old.
Down in Äpplet the jazz vocalist Isabella Lundgren played the chanteuse over yearning keys and a dolorous bass, singing the blues for a rapt crowd of all ages. And in Studion the acclaimed guitarist Lage Lund also played a doleful blues with rays of hope, Chicago style with a tinkling on the keys joined by a pronounced percussive palette of cymbal crashes with a clopping or shuffling backbeat. Lund bore a fixed gaze and bent knees as he hunched over his guitar, playing fine solos with a certain angularity.
Some of that fidgety style dissipated on the second piece of the set as Lund, a guitarist who is known for his rich chromatic phrases, opened with a solo before the crest of a wave swept up the full ensemble. They eased into a propulsive groove, and on the third effort Lund’s piquant plucks and strums stood out from a lacquered groove through their slight tartness. The leader was always ready to take a step back and provide space for his soloists, with the stellar quartet including Danny Grissett on the piano, Orlando le Fleming on bass and Karl-Henrik Oüsback on drums.
Lund played songs from last year’s Most Peculiar, a pandemic-era project nestled between his work with Melissa Aldana which saw him reunite with Sullivan Fortner, Tyshawn Sorey and Matt Brewer. Here the quartet covered the album’s opening pieces ‘Trees’, ‘Cigarettes’ and ‘Circus Island’, which Lund billed as a modern take on circus music. Then came a ‘murder ballad’ by his sometime live collaborator, the vocalist and composer Theo Bleckmann who like Lund is a native European and longtime transplant to the Big Apple, with his work influenced by the life and character of New York.
Meandering yet romantic, a bass solo brought in gentle accompaniment on the guitar while Oüsback padded his cymbals and drums. The urban frame of the bass was encouraged to wander farther afield, embracing the open air through a bit of sandstone Americana. Like a trapeze artist, Oüsback played an acrobatic drum solo as the other musicians sat out, then Lund returned with a ditty on the guitar, eventually mixing shorter squibs with longer runs and flurries. Nearly shredding, the band embraced a full sound like rolling waves which receded slightly before crashing forth, approaching fusion territory as they drove towards home.
The guest of honour at this year’s iteration of Umeå Jazz Festival was Elise Einarsdotter, the folk-inflected jazz pianist who has been active since helping to establish Tintomara in the late seventies, afterwards putting together her own ensemble. A composer, educator and radio presenter, she was celebrated on stage in Idun on Saturday evening prior to a performance by the Tensta Gospel Choir whose deep and lusty sound is rooted in spirituals and contemporary gospel.
With the saxophonist and clarinetist John Ruocco rallying in Lilla Äpplet and Selma Pinton soothing the patrons of Freja, one of the standout performers of the festival in the form of the Montreal-based Swedish vocalist Erika Angell nuzzled inside Tonsalen for her steeply illuminated and synth-clad torch songs.
Nourished on lieder, opera and jazz from her youth on the west coast of Sweden, she began her musical career as part of a post-industrial duo called The Moth and performed backup vocals for Loney Dear, before founding Thus Owls with Simon Angell and eventually relocating to Montreal. Over the course of five albums Thus Owls have explored the margins of indie rock while Angell has also collaborated with the likes of Josef Kallerdahl, Patrick Watson and Arve Henriksen, more recently inaugurating the progressive trio Beatings Are in the Body with Róisín Adams and Peggy Lee.
But this year’s The Obsession With Her Voice – out on the Montreal stalwart Constellation Records which is also home to Godspeed You! Black Emperor, Matana Roberts and Jessica Moss – marked her debut as a solo artist, embracing her affinity for unfettered improvisation and bristling electronics while still foregrounding the stark power of her voice. On the record, which contains feminist credos and alternate histories skewed towards the surreal, an ode to Nina Hagen and an excerpt from a poem by Rainer Maria Rilke, she is backed by Mili Hong on drums, Andrea Stewart and Audréanne Filion on cellos, and Scott Chancey and Thierry Lavoie-Ladouceur on violas, but for her outing at Umeå Jazz Festival she brought along Hong only, of Bellbird and the Melissa Pipe Sextet, for a truly dynamic performance where her searing vocals were matched by an incandescent whirl behind the drum kit.
Despite her improvisational chops this was still something of an offshoot for the festival, with her harsh electronics and treated vocals readily summoning comparisons with Kate Bush, PJ Harvey and Karin Dreijer of Fever Ray and The Knife. Opening amid sets from Lage Lund and the Tensta Gospel Choir, the cosy and compact Tonsalen was half full at the beginning of her performance, but the audience swiftly and steadily grew in size as the doors to the room were smartly left open, drawing in curious ears plus anyone who was ready for a bit of a palate cleanser after all that jazz.
Tugging on themes and atmospheres from feminism and the ego to the German cabaret, her layered voice which was looped and distorted through effects pedals carried over alien blips and beeps and sub-bass drones, threatening volcanic eruptions. Speaking almost in tongues, summoning a god voice of synthetic provenance and gesturing towards the ‘master of all splendour’, songs like ‘Up My Sleeve’ and ‘One’ were fiery hyperballads pitched through the smoke and embers of static electric.
The percussion clattered as Angell’s keyboards and live processing conjured slowly oscillating grooves. Tribal beats and rippling drum solos emphasised the raw power of Hong, whose comfy posture belied the intensity of her approach. Sometimes the overall effect was trance-inducing, and at other times Angell reached out more plainly to her audience, as when she asked them to repeat the words ‘life’, ‘time’, ‘pain’, ‘body’, ‘voice’, ‘friend’ and ‘love’ mid-song.
‘Bear’ opened with the lines ‘A porcupine star, a nuclear weapon / I am the cause, I am the weapon / Old habits and old ways / Are speaking’, conflating the ecological and the apocalyptic in typically elliptical fashion, while amid broken chords, ascending keys, emphatic kicks and more pummelling on the drums, ‘Let Your Hair Down’ closed the set through a vortex of sound.
From Kardzhali, a town in the Eastern Rhodopes of Bulgaria which lies close to its borders with Greece and Turkey, the hale and hardy Ivo Papasov and his Wedding Band performed in Äpplet to a packed crowd, as fleshy solos on the clarinet, kaval, accordion and guitar proved apt fare for the Saturday night audience who were increasingly festive and headstrong. As the Umeå Jazz Festival determined to go out with a bang, in Studion at the other side of Umeå Folkets Hus the saxophonist Martin Küchen unveiled his jazz opera The Death of Kalypso, a lavish interpretation of the Odyssean myth which also bears traces of his own personal tumult.
Beyond a wealth of other projects and collaborations, since 2004 the multireedist has composed music at a steady pace for Angles, his malleable ensemble which has existed as everything from a trio to a ten-piece band. Musically the idea for The Death of Kalypso was rooted in his desire to work with the vocalist Elle-Kari Sander and a string quartet. For the performance of the opera in Umeå therefore, Küchen and Sander played alongside Anna Lindal, Anna Rubinsztein and My Hellgren on violins, viola and cello, plus an eight-piece formation of Angles including Magnus Broo on the trumpet, Mats Äleklint on the trombone, Fredrik Ljungkvist on the baritone saxophone and clarinet, Johan Berthling on bass, Konrad Agnas on drums, Mattias Ståhl on vibes and glockenspiel and Alex Zethson who flitted between keys and synths.
In the Odyssey, the nymph Calypso keeps the Greek hero Odysseus captive for seven years, eventually releasing him from the island of Ogygia at the behest of sterner gods. According to some later mythological accounts, Calypso bore Odysseus the sons Nausithous and Nausinous, and even killed herself owing to her unrequited love. Küchen traces these outlines while offering a more impassioned and psychological treatment of the myth, whose language is closer to the high tragedies of Euripides, with Kalypso casting herself as a woman scorned, and includes passages in French and Arabic plus an exclamation which calls to mind the song ‘Once in a Lifetime’ by the Talking Heads. In due course we take a discursion to the spa town of Karlsbad in the Czech Republic, written according to Küchen with the ‘memory of his father’s recent passing still raging in his head’.
Küchen composed and wrote the libretto for The Death of Kalypso, with Sander providing the vocal arrangements and Zethson contributing string arrangements plus the wind arrangements for ‘Kalypso in Karlsbad, haunted by dreams’ and ‘A campaign of tragedy’. In this live setting the suite opened with a tremulous bass and violin, quavering on the horizon for a moment before deepening and intensifying as an interstitial drone sounded a note of elegy.
A brief lull served to shadow the introduction of Elle-Kari Sander, who conducted proceedings in the manner of a Greek god or aspiring minor deity commanding ‘Give me water, give me fire, give me aether’, which in this case must have meant more double bass, more saxophone and more drums. Only the instruments ordained by this god were given passage to enter, as the musicians jerked into life less as a chorus than like so many animatrons.
Stretching from operatic swells to the outcrops of free jazz and from chamber pop – aspects of which reminded me of the Spektral Quartet, Julia Holter and Alex Temple project Behind the Wallpaper or the Baudelairean death whorls and ardent meditations of the Norwegian singer Susanna – back to the collages and critiques of The Threepenny Opera by Brecht and Weill, the opening piece ‘Messieurs-dames’ surveyed the devastation while ‘Une certaine paix’ by way of recollection found a moment of optimism or at least respite, a ‘sunny day’ with ‘no clouds, no chains’ where old regrets might be put to bed.
After some nice work by Mattias Ståhl on the metallophones, it was the saxophones of Küchen and Ljungkvist which really got the jam going, as washes of colour, clouds and other passing shapes in the sky turned into up-front grooves with a thick low end. A spectral, even stygian saxophone gave way to delicate keys as on ‘Fetus of Dawn’, portrayed as a conversation with her son, Sander as Kalypso began to rattle off an ‘infantry of the heart’ delivering one long groaning cry while the ensemble stomped and swooned to their first big climax.
From the island of Ogygia to the springs and colonnades of Karlsbad, limpid grooves, string flourishes and a stirring low end through the grumbling and moaning of the trombone and baritone sax, the double bass and the cello filled out both these milieus and the emotional rancour of Kalypso. At moments the keys seemed to call up ‘Someday My Prince Will Come’ from Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs or the rock opera Evita, and saxophone squalls or long drum rolls were juxtaposed with loose plucks and bows as the music became more fragmented, mirroring a cracked state as Sander sang ‘To sing you immortal / That was my simple plan / How can anyone resist an offer of this kind / Without losing his mind?’.
Casting her own net as Odysseus sails the seas again, what Kalypso gets back not in trinkets but in scraps is only a labyrinth of death, a fitting end to a campaign of tragedy. But the organisers of Umeå Jazz Festival had made doubly sure to wrap their own campaign with aplomb, as while Angles with Elle-Kari Sander and strings were tying things up in Studion, the Trondheim Jazz Orchestra and the power jazz trio I LIKE TO SLEEP were surging in Idun as they built towards one last big flourish.
Offering a unique combination of vibraphone, baritone guitar and drums, the Trondheim-based trio of Amund Storløkken Åse, Nicolas Leirtrø and Øyvind Leite share a passion for free jazz and seventies progressive rock while taking their name from a prostrate Thelonious Monk, who said ‘I like to sleep. There is no set time of day for sleep. You sleep when you’re tired and that’s all there is to it’. After a couple of albums on Rune Grammofon, they returned to home base with their fourth studio album Bedmonster’s Groove released on All Good Clean Records earlier this year.
Meanwhile since its formation in 2000 the Trondheim Jazz Orchestra has worked with everyone from Chick Corea, Pat Metheny and Joshua Redman to acclaimed Norwegian composers like Eirik Hegdal, Vigleik Storgaas and their current artistic director Ole Morten Vågan plus the experimental musicians Kim Myhr and Jenny Hval. Now virtually an ever-present at Umeå Jazz Festival, with six appearances over the last seven years, this iteration of the Trondheim Jazz Orchestra featured Henriette Eilertsen, Mats Gustafsson and Jenny Frøysa on flutes and baritone saxophones, Heiða Karine Jóhannesdóttir Mobeck on tuba and electronics, Tuva Halse on violin, Sigrid Sand Angelsen on cello, Anja Lauvdal on synthesizers and Wurlitzer organ, Kyrre Laastad on turntables, percussion and electronics and Torstein Slåen on guitar.
As a team I LIKE TO SLEEP and the Trondheim Jazz Orchestra have been touring their new work ‘Pieces of Scattered Dreams’ since its premiere at Moldejazz in the middle of July. Those handful of dates took in Trondheim and Oslo with a final stop over the border in Umeå.
On record the trio’s heavy sound is often led out by Amund Storløkken Åse on vibes, with the woozy Mellotron of Bedmonster’s Groove also a facet of this new collaboration. If that album somewhat eschewed their penchant for crashing riffs and dense power chords, on stage with the Trondheim Jazz Orchestra what emanated was a punishing wall of noise, with the floor clad in globules of neon while the screen behind the musicians bore forests and cityscapes plus other abstractions all through the lens of a kind of swirling vortex or all-seeing eye.
Deep and pulsating drones wrought by some mixture of the baritone saxophones and guitar, the tuba, the Wurlitzer and Mellotron carried the wailing tonality of a Great Highland bagpipe. Psychedelic melodies evoked the furtive race-through-the-woods horror of The Blair Witch Project or the raucous theme to the allegorical sixties spy-fi drama The Prisoner, while strobe lighting seemed to both compel and invite the audience while keeping them at bay. There were also traces of seventies psychedelic or spiritual jazz, from Alice Coltrane and Pharoah Sanders all the way through to Weather Report, courtesy of the keys and especially the playing of the woodwind section.
Mushrooming lights, racing strings and shredded guitars were charged with drama through the low pitch of Mobeck’s tuba, with the overall effect much like the screeching of hot tires whose wide skid marks chafe and blacken the road. Together the Trondheim Jazz Orchestra and WE LIKE TO SLEEP engaged in a hedonistic cross-country trip with all of the danger and intemperance which that might entail, and just when you thought they were done as a group they rerouted and lurched again.
