Four years after Cantando, a new album from the Bobo Stenson Trio - recorded in Lugano in December 2011 - explores a broad arc of material. Wide-ranging repertoire has become a hallmark of Bobo Stenson albums. But it's not just the eclecticism that is striking: Stenson, bassist Anders Jormin and drummer Jon Fält take these far-flung sources and make an organic, breathing music out of them.
Stenson, of course, has long been one of the greats of Scandinavian jazz, and an ECM artist since the first years of the label (his recordings with Jan Garbarek in the 1970s were recently reissued as the boxed set Dansere). But there is a balance of energies in this particular trio - clear-edged lyrical piano playing, rootedness and keen choice of notes from the bass, and detailed, textural drumming - that is especially satisfying.
On Indicum can be found free playing (the trio has its own, fresh approach to collective improvising), tunes by Bill Evans ("Your Story", offered here as a tribute to Paul Motian, for whom this tune was a favourite) and by George Russell ("Event VI" from "Living Time", another piece associated with Evans), Danish composer Carl Nielsen's "Oft Am I Glad", a Norwegian hymn (in an arrangement by Anders Jormin and folk singer Sinikka Langeland), contemporary composition by Norway's Ola Gjeilo, a Wolf Biermann protest song, Argentine composer Ariel Ramírez's folkloric "La Peregrinación", and more.
"Few contemporary jazz groups sustain an atmosphere as evocatively as Swedish pianist Stenson's trio, or conjure so many moods across a variety of material" wrote John Fordham, reviewing Cantando in The Guardian. "Nothing, from a steaming postbop line to a stroked cymbal-edge or a sitar-like bass phrase, suggests a hint of an accidental sound - yet somehow the music never dims the glow of spontaneity."
Personnel: Bobo Stenson (piano), Ander Jormin (double-bass), Jon Fält (drums)