***RELEASES MAY 17th***

STHLM svaga plays jazz and free jazz music quietly. They work with the limitations of precipices. Sounds emerge from the precipice of nothing and sit on the edge of existing. Here in this precarious state, a microcosm of detail, expression and effort are magnified. There is an endless exploration in the liminal space of becoming, sounding and decay.

For their new recording ’Plays Carter, Plays Mitchell, Plays Shepp’, they collaborated with jazz icons Archie Shepp, Ron Carter and Roscoe Mitchell who they commissioned Die Rechnung - Chrystal Stairs - Blues - U-Jama, Desert lament and Never Sound More! from respectively. Ron Carter also came to Stockholm and joined the ensemble during the recording of Desert Lament for artistic guidance.

In addition to these three commissioned pieces, the album contains an intense (yet still soft) sax/drums duo-version of John Coltrane’s composition Jupiter, as well as a remarkable piano trio rendition of legendary Swedish pianist/composer Per Henrik Wallin’s piece Winter Rhapsody.

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I wonder how often as listeners nowadays we are confronted by something truly provocative. At this point, composers have mined extremes of pitch, of duration, of timbre, of dynamic — in fact, of virtually any and all parameters, for a very considerable time. Outstanding — in the literal sense — levels of technical prowess amongst performers are similarly unusual. Progress being what it is, extremes rarely seem to remain extreme for long (with beautiful, and sometimes unlikely, exceptions).

As someone familiar with some of STHLM svaga’s work, I knew what was coming, very broadly speaking. And yet on listening to this new recording, I was nonetheless challenged. Not least, and in a deeply satisfying way, to summon the discipline simply to focus on the music in and of itself: the band’s conviction and conception being such that any number of realisations, questions, and reflections crop up at almost every turn, each threatening to divert the curious mind from the main event (I hope and assume, however interesting theoretical reflections might be, that the sounds themselves are the main event).

Often — shame on us — we associate provocation with drama: louder, faster, higher. Here, conversely, the challenge is far stealthier: consider, for instance, the frequent use of the language of post-bop — let’s very crudely date it as one which has been spoken for around 75 years — as the proverbial Trojan Horse for their radicalism. The music embodies an earnest, forensic investigation into one end of the dynamic spectrum at the same time as a certain playfulness or mischief, insofar as it uses as its vehicle a language which is often perceived as forming the backbone of a particularly neo-conservative strand of post-1960s jazz.

For sure, the ‘quiet world’ (as Anthony Braxton refers to it) has been explored in depth elsewhere. Somewhere near me at the time of writing sits my copy of Ligeti’s “Fanfares”, with its notorious pppppppp (count ‘em) marking in measure 170; or think of more prolonged voyages towards the silence made by composers such as Sciarrino or Nono amongst many others. But in jazz derived musics, it’s certainly much harder to think of musicians who have so systematically investigated this end of the spectrum. To put it more simply, many of us will have been in those jazz rehearsals where the sum total of engagement with dynamics at all is something along the lines of ‘let’s play that bit a little quieter’.

Not that dynamic details exist separately from other details. We are familiar with how playing extremely quietly can render things dramatically more precarious for the instrumentalist: how the pianist who, in their reticence, fails to depress the key with the requisite velocity risks making no sound at all (the solution? I still remember the mantra of one of my piano teachers: “p for positive!”); or how difficult it is for the wind player or vocalist to produce a sufficiently focussed, supported column of air when striving to play quietly. But consider how beautifully these dynamic struggles affect the timbral qualities of the instruments: how vulnerable and yet richly textured the trumpet sounds when it enters on “Desert Lament”, or the miraculous quality the voice takes on when scored in that higher octave during “U-Jama”, two thirds of the way through the Shepp suite. Like the detail which reveals itself as we zoom in on a fractal, what compared to some notion of the norm might initially be deemed an imperfection in tone or timbre turns out in fact to be a massive, craggy and fundamental sonic feature — a new terrain to chart. In concrete terms, we understand that timbral possibilities exist for instrumental combinations in the quiet world which are quite different to those in the more normal dynamic range. Thus it is that the human whistle (a subtle continuity, in fact, with STHLM svaga’s collaboration with Carla Bley, “Bells and Whistles”) can be voiced with complete parity together with the trumpet and clarinet during Roscoe Mitchell’s “Never Sound More!”

We also come to understand that zooming in, traditionally something which is perhaps thought of as enlightening or clarifying, can also disorientate. Three minutes or so into Ron Carter’s composition, where we start to hear the grit and the grain of the saxophone tone, we need to trust our ears: that is indeed a baritone saxophone which has ghosted-in for a few phrases – the spirit of Lars Gullin made that little bit
more explicit. But whereas at more normal dynamics levels, this would be completely obvious, given the quite different tone-colour of the Bb and Eb saxophones, in this context, my sense is that momentarily at least, we can’t quite see the wood for the trees.

Is it possible that as we begin to hear this grit and grain, this increased sense of the texture of the sound, our sense of chronology is also subtly upset? Of course these days, it is commonplace to fetishise the qualities of older analogue sound — the humanising effect which we take that little bit of sonic ‘dirt’ to impart. But on hearing the Shepp, for instance, the soundworld initially drew me back not to ‘classic’ era Shepp (the Impulse! sound of the 1960s and 1970s), but instead further back and curiously specifically to some recordings made in Stockholm in 1953, under the leadership of Clifford Brown and Art Farmer, in the company of an all-star Swedish line-up which included Arne Domnerus and the aforementioned Gullin. Another diversionary thought, then, which this group prompted, and one which visited me again listening to the Per-Henrik Wallin composition, “Winter Rhapsody”. Because if the Clifford Brown/Archie Shepp nexus is not necessarily obvious, neither is Matthew Shipp’s championing of Bill Evans, which came to mind as a result of hearing the Wallin. For during this rendition, we hear Wallin – a pianist who is often associated with sound delivered in dark-hued slabs and diamond-hard shards (also Shipp characteristics) – imbued, through the medium of Rasmus Borg’s wonderful touch, with a stunningly delicate, crystalline luminosity (a defining Evans characteristic).

This album also causes us to question our learned responses to certain musical devices. Carter’s “Desert Lament” may sound filmic to some (and this in itself sparks certain associations: we may be put in mind, for instance, of the work of another Swede, the legendary Bernt Rosengren, in the company of Krzysztof Komeda on soundtracks such as “Knife in the Water”). Perhaps it is the burnished trumpet sound, recalling the Miles of “Ascenseur pour l’échafaud”, a classic signifier of cool. But zeroing-in on the details of the extremely quiet trumpet, far from just urbanity, we somehow also understand the struggle of sound production, and the sheer strength needed to play in this way: metaphorically speaking, we can quite clearly perceive the paddling of the duck under the water. This track at first glance put me in mind of nothing quite so much as when I first worked with dancers: for all their grace on stage, backstage, nothing was quite so apparent as their raw athleticism and the toll this fluency of movement took on their bodies.

This trip to the quiet world is not just about revelation, however; it is also about reminders. If we are tempted to think of Shepp’s music as raw and expressionist, this is not completely wrong. We simply need to remember that the iconic shout and body of his tone has always been surrounded by that equally iconic corona of textured breathiness. The same was also true of the great Ben Webster, a clear model for Shepp: for every bark which he uttered (listen to the famous “Cottontail” solo), there was also a moment where the note was intimated by an audible stream of air as much as it was sounded explicitly (the album with Art Tatum, a very special one to me personally, is replete with examples).
Roscoe Mitchell has long shown that limitation can be the mother of possibility. The nine note pitch set of the opening of “Nonaah” doesn’t frustrate me for not containing ten or more: on the contrary, it shows a universe of potential. The working repertoire of Lee Konitz was famously limited to a small handful of tunes, yet surely the miraculous paths he could chart through those chord changes were in part a result of this. Similarly, although we might conveniently describe STHLM svaga’s concept with reference to their self-imposed limitation (and to those who might complain of a lack of freedom, the answer is that choosing to abide by a limitation is in itself an exercise of autonomy), it makes much more sense when describing their actual music with reference to the vistas it opens up. Their music is at once obstinate and playful; it is vulnerable and frail at the same time as being self-assured and uncompromising. It is music which will allow itself to dissolve almost to silence, but which is not afraid to dig in and swing. The group can unselfconsciously and unironically play a blues in one of its simplest harmonic incarnations, as well as, through delicate wisps and tendrils of sound, almost insinuate as much as play a composition such as John

Coltrane’s “Jupiter”. Theirs is a frequently almost impossibly delicate music: yet this may variously be a frail delicacy, or a delicacy with the order, strength and organisation of a spider’s web. They have engineered a soundworld when ‘mezzo piano’ can feel like a sledgehammer, and where we experience ‘fortissimo’ by sheer power of implication; where provocation and calm coexist; and yet one too where the beauty, peace and escapism of the quiet world is ever present.
Alexander Hawkins, Oxford, January 2024