#esbjörn svensson

[guy60660]

Esbjörn Svensson | Katarina Grip Höök | New York Times

[nervoussystemmusicreverence]

Esbjörn Svensson Trio - Seven Days of Falling

Music Video

Artist

Esbjörn Svensson Trio

Composer

Esbjörn Svensson Trio

Produced

Esbjörn Svensson Trio

Credit

Dan Berglund – Double bass Magnus Öström – Drums Esbjörn Svensson – Piano

Released

December 9 2003

Streaming

[projazznet]

A recently discovered 2008 recording shows a different side of the late Swedish pianist/composer.

[onekindredspirit]

Esbjörn Svensson Trio "From Gagarin's Point Of View"

[caviarsonoro]

[justforbooks]

The dapper and sagacious Ahmad Jamal may have looked more like a UN delegate than a jazz musician, but he was recognised as a truly great jazz artist by some of the music’s most notable pioneers. Jamal, who has died aged 92, was hailed in the 1940s and 50s by Art Tatum and Miles Davis, and more recently by McCoy Tyner and Keith Jarrett. In the 90s, when a jazz piano-trio renaissance was being led by gifted newcomers such as Brad Mehldau, Jason Moran, Geri Allen and Esbjörn Svensson, Jamal did not retire to the sidelines but played better than ever. The former Wynton Marsalis pianist and composer Eric Reed has said that Jamal is to the piano trio “what Thomas Edison was to electricity”.

He was a fascinating philosopher of contemporary music and a lifelong critic of the entertainment business, which he accused of fleecing African-American artists. Although he recognised the structural and technical distinctions of jazz and European classical music, he was adamant that there was no superiority of one over the other in what he called “the emotional dimensions”. “You have to know what the hell you’re doing,” he told me in 1996, “whether you’re playing the body of work from Europe or the body of work from Louis Armstrong.”

Jamal was born Frederick Jones in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and regarded the eclectic musical culture of his birthplace as crucial to his development. His father was an open-hearth worker in the steel mills, but his uncle Lawrence played the piano and at only three years old Jamal was copying his playing by ear. He took lessons from seven, and would recall “studying Mozart along with Art Tatum”, unaware of white society’s widespread prejudice that European music was supposed to be superior to that of African-Americans. Significant influences in his early years were the music teacher Mary Cardwell Dawson (founder of the National Negro Opera Company), and his aunt Louise, who showered him with sheet music for the popular songs of the day. Pianists Tatum, Nat King Cole and Erroll Garner were among the young “Fritz” Jones’s principal jazz influences, and he also studied piano with James Miller at Westinghouse high school.

At 17 he toured with the former Westinghouse student George Hudson’s Count Basie-influenced orchestra, worked in a song-and-dance team, and wrote one of his most enduring themes, Ahmad’s Blues, at 18. Two years later he adopted Islam, and the name Ahmad Jamal. He also joined a group called the Four Strings, which became the Three Strings with the departure of its violinist, and caught the ear of the talent-spotting producer John Hammond, who signed the trio to Columbia’s Okeh label.

The public liked Jamal’s distinctive treatments of popular songs, and so did Davis. Developing his new quintet in 1955, Davis sent his rhythm section to study Jamal’s then drummer-less group. Davis liked Jamal’s pacing and use of space (the prevailing bebop jazz style was usually hyperactive), and he noticed that Jamal’s guitarist, Ray Crawford, often tapped the body of his instrument on the fourth beat. Davis told his drummer, Philly Joe Jones, to copy the effect with a fourth-beat rimshot, which became a characteristic sound of that ultra-hip Davis ensemble. Davis began to feature Jamal’s originals and arrangements in his own output, including New Rhumba (on his 1957 Miles Ahead collaboration with Gil Evans), and Billy Boy (on 1958’s classic Milestones session).

The gifted young Chicago bassist Israel Crosby joined the trio in 1955, and the following year the percussionist Vernel Fournier – who fulfilled Jamal’s requirements for a subtle hand-drummer as well as orthodox sticks-player – replaced Crawford. The group became the house band at the Pershing Hotel in Chicago, and one night in January 1958 they recorded more than 40 tracks there. One was Poinciana, which had been a hit tune from the 1952 movie Dreamboat. Jamal modernised its Latin groove, maintained a catchy hook throughout the improvisation, and found himself with a pop hit that stayed in the charts for two years.

Eight songs from that night, including Poinciana, made up the million-selling album At the Pershing: But Not for Me. Jamal’s newfound wealth led him to branch out into club ownership by opening the Alhambra in Chicago, though the venture barely lasted a year. Crosby and Fournier left for the pianist George Shearing’s group in 1962, and Jamal recorded the Latin-influenced Macanudo album the next year, with a new trio and a full orchestra. He also explored his cultural and ancestral roots in Africa, then recorded Heat Wave in 1966 – with a new group (Jamil Nasser on bass and Frank Gant on drums) and a more contemporary feel, reflected in the funkier approach to his old piano hero Garner’s Misty.

Jamal’s knack of keeping audiences mesmerised with unexpected modulations, time changes and catchy riffs, while never losing the undercurrent of the tune, was still unmistakably intact. His trademark device of insinuating a song – through toying with its bassline or its characteristic groove, but endlessly delaying the appearance of the tune – was adopted by many later jazz pianists, including such contemporary masters as Mehldau.

In 1970 Jamal recorded Johnny Mandel’s M*A*S*H theme for the movie’s soundtrack, and with the albums Jamaica (in 1974, which included Marvin Gaye’s Trouble Man as well as M*A*S*H) and Intervals (1979, which included a Steely Dan cover), showed he was not averse to toying with pop forms and even electric pianos. But he soon returned to the jazz of his roots. In 1982 he made the live album American Classical Music (it was the term he always preferred to the word “jazz”), sustained a steady output through the decade, and with Chicago Revisited (1992) sounded as assured and inventive as ever.

Now in his 60s, Jamal began to develop a higher profile in Europe. Sessions for the Dreyfus label in France led to The Essence (issued in three parts in the 90s), and found him in full flight with the saxophonists George Coleman and Stanley Turrentine and the trumpeter Donald Byrd. In 1995 his version of Music, Music, Music and the original take of Poinciana were featured in the Clint Eastwood film The Bridges of Madison County. He made what he regarded as one of his best recordings with Live in Paris 1996 (featuring Coleman again), and returned to the city to celebrate his 70th birthday in 2000 with Coleman; he was in inspired form on what would be released as the album A l’Olympia (2001).

With the exciting James Cammack on bass and Idris Muhammad on drums, Jamal’s composing blossomed. Striking originals dominated his 2003 album In Search of Momentum, and he even made a faintly stagey but soulful foray into singing, amid a raft of virtuoso keyboard displays, on After Fajr (2005).

Jamal’s alertness to an irresistible riff, like his keyboard contemporary Herbie Hancock’s, made him a favourite with hip-hop artists, and De La Soul’s Stakes Is High and Nas’s The World Is Yours were among many unmistakable testaments to that. Mosaic Records’ nine-CD set of his game-changing work in the late 1950s and early 60s was released in 2011, his group made a spectacular live appearance in London in 2014, and his last album releases came in 2022 with Emerald City Nights: Live at the Penthouse, parts one and two, featuring live recordings made in Seattle during the 60s. A third in the series is due for release this year.

Jamal was married and divorced three times – to Virginia Wilkins, Sharifah Frazier and Laura Hess-Hay. He is survived by a daughter, Sumayah, from his second marriage, and two grandchildren.

🔔 Ahmad Jamal (Frederick Russell Jones), musician, born 2 July 1930; died 16 April 2023

Daily inspiration. Discover more photos at http://justforbooks.tumblr.com

[musicollage]

Esbjörn Svensson Trio – Plays Monk. 1996 : Superstudio Gul + ACT.

[fugengulsen]

Esbjörn Svensson Trio with Pat Metheny - Behind The Yashmack - Live Jazz...

[china-blue]

"Esbjörn Svensson Trio - When God Created The Coffee Break"

[burlveneer-music]

Rymden & Kork - Bugge Wesseltoft’s piano trio (with E.S.T.’s Magnus Öström and Dan Berglund) plus orchestra (Jazzland)

Since forming in 2018 RYMDEN has established itself as one of the leading piano trios to ever emerge from the Nordic Jazz scene. All three members bring with them long-confirmed and lauded histories as innovators in jazz: Berglund and Öström via the Esbjörn Svensson Trio and their own projects (Tonbruket and Magnus Öström Band respectively); Wesseltoft via his New Conception of Jazz and other projects. Now, after several albums and many concerts, they meet KORK, an orchestra capable of responding to the trifold creative power that RYMDEN vigorously generates. KORK, for over three-quarters of a century has followed its own musical curiosity across genres, from "standard" orchestral repertoire, both classical and contemporary, to jazz, rock, and pop. Through close association with NRK, KORK has been heard across the world through its participation in the annual Nobel Peace Prize concert and the Eurovision Song Contests in 1986 and 1996. The combination of RYMDEN and KORK brings even greater contrast to music that already had its fair share of light and shade and brings a broader textural palette that enriches and defamiliarizes the compositions. These new arrangements expand on their source material, creating a different musical world without sacrifice of its original spirit. The compositions, already filled with drama or meditative passages, menace or light-hearted humour, rhythmic drive or fragmentary expression, are repainted, sometimes with the lightest of nuanced touches, other times with densely layered maximalism. Where the collaboration of RYMDEN and KORK may have been unexpected for some, the perfect alignment of the results suggest that it was inevitable.

[projazznet]

E.S.T. / Esbjörn Svensson Trio – From Gagarin’s Point Of View

From Gagarin’s Point of View is the bands most popular album.

[philipperivrain]

Esbjörn Svensson Trio (Seven Days Of Falling/Elevation of Love)

[twistedsoulmusic]

With Superkilen, Danish duo Svaneborg Kardyb crafts a serene sonic landscape offering a soothing escape from modern life’s chaos. The pair, comprised of Nikolaj Svaneborg on Wurlitzer, Juno, and piano and Jonas Kardyb on drums and percussion, has garnered acclaim, winning New Artist of the Year and Composer of the Year at the Danish Music Awards Jazz in 2019. Drawing inspiration from Danish folk music and Scandinavian jazz luminaries like Nils Frahm, Esbjörn Svensson, and Jan Johansson’s Jazz På Svenska, they meld beautiful melodies with delicate minimalism and subtle electronica vibes.

[maraismagic]

Tune of the day from our latest album release. Our take on a track by Swedish jazz greats, EST:-