Cantando (ECM)
Bob Stenson Trio
Released August 2008
Jazzwise Top 10 Releases of 2008
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“Cantando”, from the Spanish word for “singing”, is the title of a characteristically far-ranging programme by the resourceful Bobo Stenson Trio. Alongside group improvisation and new compositions (including two tunes by bassist Anders Jormin), the Swedish trio play “Love, I’ve Found You”, a standard which Stenson has loved in both Miles Davis and Wynton Kelly versions, back to back with the 1907 “Liebesode” of Alban Berg. Unexpected juxtapositions belong to this group’s methodology: on the “Serenity” album of 1999, Stenson already performed “Die Nachtigall”, also from Berg’s “Sieben frühe Lieder” cycle.
The trio plays, twice, “Song of Ruth” by Czech composer Petr Eben, who died just a few weeks before this session. A piece originally scored for soprano and organ, it is transformed here. Astor Piazzolla’s intensely expressive tango “Chiqulin de Bachin”, dances at a sultry slow pace. Also from the Latin American corner: the supple “Olivia”, by Cuban songwriter and folk/protest singer Silvio Rodriguez, another Stenson Trio favourite.
The lilting “Don’s Kora Song” is a tune Bobo often played during his long association with the late Don Cherry: “Don had a real affinity for West African music and was strongly inspired by it. When we travelled, there would often be tapes of music from Mali playing in the bus: the sound of that has been in my ears for years.” Cherry also used to tip Stenson off to rarer Ornette Coleman tunes, but the uncommon “A Fixed Goal” reached the pianist by another route. It is one of the pieces Ornette played during his latter day association with Joachim Kuhn, relayed to Bobo by French bassist Jean-Paul Celea. No other pianist plays Coleman like Bobo does, however, with the darting horn-like figures in the right hand, and an exultant feeling of freedom in the melodies. “Well, the beauty of Ornette is that the goals are really not so fixed! The fact that his pieces are very rarely chordally-based gives you this wonderful sense of openness, the feeling you can take the music anywhere.”
“Pages”, fourteen minutes of spontaneously composed material, is actually four separate group improvisations. Selected by Manfred Eicher from seven free pieces the group played in the studio, they eloquently demonstrate how form may be found in the moment. The whole sequence makes astute use of space: this is free chamber music. “Space is important,” Bobo Stenson told JazzTimes, “to create an atmosphere is important, to keep a whole thing around it,” journalist Tom Conrad maintained that, “in terms of atmosphere few pianists ‘keep a whole thing around it’ like Stenson. In all tempos, in all keys, in all musical situations, his notes hang in the air like what Wordsworth called ‘thoughts too deep for tears’.”
“I have always been interested in classical music and folk music,” Stenson told All About Jazz L.A. “You like a melody, and you play it. You have to be open to what happens around you.” And of course, you have to choose your material carefully, and respect it. If Stenson has long integrated his knowledge of the genres – jazz, classical, folk and more – into a coherent and unified style, critical awareness of his achievement continues to grow steadily. In 2006 he won the European Jazz Prize as Musician of the Year. The “Reflections” album won both a Swedish Grammy and the Golden Record Award of Orkester Journalen, and “Serenity” and “Goodbye” were albums of the month in publications around the world.
“Cantando” was recorded in December 2007 at the Auditorium Radio Svizzera Italiana, Lugano, a recital space increasingly valued as an ECM recording location. (Other albums recorded there in recent seasons include “The Third Man” by Enrico Rava/Stefano Bollani, “Le Voyage de Sahar” by Anouar Brahem, “Vignettes” by Marilyn Crispell, and “Nostalghia” by François Couturier.)
Track Listing:
1. Olivia (Silvio Rodriguez) 6:38
2. Song of Ruth (Petr Eben) 6:42
3. Wooden Church (Anders Jormin) 7:01
4. M (Anders Jormin) 7:59
5. Chiquilin de Bachin (Horacio Ferrer / Astor Piazzolla) 8:04
6. Pages (Bobo Stenson Trio) 13:40
7. Don’s Kora Song (Don Cherry) 5:08
8. A Fixed Goal (Ornette Coleman) 4:12
9. Love I’ve Found You (Connie Moore / Danny Small) 3:12
10. Liebesode (Alban Berg) 8:36
11. Song of Ruth (Petr Eben) 6:47
Personnel:
Bobo Stenson: piano
Anders Jormin: double-bass
Jon Fält: drums
Recorded December 2007, at Auditorium Radio Svizzera, Lugano (Switzerland), by Stefano Amerio
Cover Photo: Thomas Wunsch
Design: Sascha Kleis
Produced by Manfred Eicher
Review:
Cantando, the latest release by Bobo Stenson on the ECM label, thoughtfully articulates the road travelled by the Swedish pianist since his emergence in jazz in the 1960s. On it, he reveals his lifelong love of jazz and classical music and his interest in music beyond both that has characterised his career. It’s the fifth instalment in a continuum of trio albums that began in 1996 with Reflections, and is the direct expression of a musician who places great premium on melody. “It’s not that we look for pieces [for the trio] specifically,” he says down the line from his apartment in Stockholm. “It’s the music that has to come across, let’s say. You like melodies, and you think, ‘We can do something with that.’”
For almost 40 years Stenson has been at the forefront of European jazz, performing with some of its greatest names as well as well as some of the greatest American stars, creating several classic recordings along the way, as well as several in his own right.
Reflections, for example, received the two highest awards that a jazz record can win in Sweden, a Grammy and a Golden Record Award, and the three trio albums that followed, War Orphans (1998), Serenity (2000), a two CD set, and Goodbye (2005), all with bassist Anders Jormin, received unanimous international acclaim, with Svensk Musik describing Serenity as, “a milestone in the progress of modern jazz.”
On Cantando, compositions by Alban Berg and the Czech composer Petr Eben co-exist alongside pieces by Don Cherry, Ornette Coleman and the standard ‘Love, I’ve Found You,’ recorded by both Miles Davis and Wynton Kelly. Equally, Stenson’s openness to diverse musical influences is reflected by the inclusion of an Astor Piazzolla tango and Cuban melody by the folk-protest singer Silvio Rodriguez. Like all the music on the album they are thoughtfully re-configured in a personal musical language and become Bobo Stenson’s music – music of haunting depth and lyricism.
Reflecting on his choice of material, he explains: “[Bassist] Anders [Jormin] brought ‘Song of Ruth’. He had played with an organ player at his university, and I had never heard of [Czech] composer Petr Eben, but he is quite a big name in the organ music world, who died a year-and-a-half ago. So we tried it out and Manfred [Eicher, the boss of ECM records] liked it very much, so we included two versions of that piece Then we have Rodriguez [a Cuban folk/protest singer], these things happen, you just come across them like the Piazolla piece [‘Chiquilin de Bachin’]. ‘Liebesode’ is by Alban Berg. Since we are interested in classical music, we always bring some to the band, and we have actually done a Berg [piece] before, we did ‘Die Nachtigall’ [The Nightingale] on Serenity [from 1999], for instance.”
Stuart Nicholson (Jazzwise)
