Jazz pa svenska

As the spread of English may have facilitated the worldwide communication, and 'negative that the growing dominance of this language has led to a remarkable degree of ignorance, if not an actual decline, or about the results to the poetics of production culture of other languages
(Swedish poet Gunnar Ekelof)

This affirmation and 'also applies to music, where often the value of European culture with jazz, and' was that of imitation and forgetfulness of the roots of folk music. Combined with a purely linear conception of time, where any act takes on a connotation reactionary or progressive, this concept has brought music "educated" to move away from European melodic roots, shut themselves in a fortress intellectual, perpetually in search of progressivism.

The only lighthouse in this musical picture, and in Europe 'was in Scandinavia, the current that is aptly named the Scandinavian Jazz, has been long in the 60's, with the contamination occurred in the great pioneers of World Music as Don Cherry and George Russell who Jazz musicians attended the young generations of Swedes, Norwegians and Danes.

The road to the European Jazz may 'be summed up in these elements:

• Simplicity 'Melodica
• Refinement Chromatic
• Repetitiveness' folk (Serial)
• Drama 'Melodic
• Sobriety 'Modal

All elements present and recognizable in the works of Scandinavian musicians. Starting from the Norwegian saxophonist Jan Garbarek, and all accrued and grown around the musicians from the sixties onwards (Christensen, Daniellson, Gullin, Pedersen, Stenson, Johansson, etc ...)

Sweden in particular has produced and continues to produce talented European jazz especially in the art of the piano. Last unfortunate talented pianist Esbjorn Svensson, who had just died just 44 years, in the bloom of creativity ', magnificent example of what music should be, not a point in a linear progression, not a frantic search of progressivism, but a graph can take inspiration from the tradition to look forward without posing the problem of positioning in time and business. This was music to Svensson, the first great son of the brilliant Swedish pianist Jan Johansson, who also died prematurely at just 37 years old in 1968.

Listening to music Johansson even more 'than that of Svensson you can feel the crystalline beauty of the Nordic tradition, the introverted and melancholic melodies, shamanic and repetitive, the Scandinavian tradition.
The album Jazz and pa svenska 'was the most jazz record' sold in Sweden of all time, a collection of folk melodies, fused with a strong swing, with a melodic refinement and sobriety 'modal that is unmatched in the continental productions.
For example, in my opinion still unsurpassed "world music" in the more 'real, deep meaning of the term. Research work related to simplicity ', like other works of Johansson in search of slaves contamination in Scandinavian folklore with Jazz records and Jazz pa pa Rynska ungarska. A dramatically interrupted work on a cold winter morning in 1968 from a car accident to a concert.

The road, however, 'was opened, the seed was fertilized generations of jazz musicians, as indeed Esbjorn Svensson, I remember that after days to find a way to do it this way, through contacts with his artistic father and through the relationship Overall with all the music, away from the music labels who hated attack, far from the critical linear perception of the music and 'full. One of the songs most 'beautiful trio of precisely Car Crush and' dedicated to the disappearance of Johansson, recalling his delicate and wistful sound typical of Scandinavian floclore.

And in a sense the voice of these artists had been preceded by major European artists of the classical tradition that had been able to "break" with the conception of progressive and linear, as the Finnish composer Sibelius and Bartok Hungarian (Slavic tradition and once again Scandinavian approach more 'than they might seem)

Most of the music, well written and 'ending. but not 'nothing more' than a doodle note.Manca the inner life. They built a huge yard, but where 'the ship?

The most striking thing about 'the composers of today and' the rumination. What I write resembles more 'to mathematics, that the music at times and' just mathematics. E 'is often grave that no inner life. I can not conceive that the music of the future will be 'so' and contrived as the 'today. And 'it is inconceivable in what is written today lack a completely ethical ..... This' which is eternal lives sometimes forms very small.
(J. Sibelius)

And precisely this is the route taken by many Scandinavian jazz musicians, the search for simple form of the popular roots, away from the temptation to exaggerate the language, and not 'a case that this trend has been influenced by the likes of Cecil Taylor, Archie Sheep, Don Cherry, Paul Bley, Eric Dolphy, people of the so-called "new thing" that paradoxically drew on the tradition of most 'of what the critics think of the time.
All these musicians moved into the receptive Scandinavia were able to fertilize and renew the language of jazz in Europe able to repopulate the more 'profound simplicity' folk tone.

And on the more 'big' surely the shaman of modern music Don Cherry, who in the sixties gathered information on what you can 'call ethnic music, collecting information about Indian ways and stairs, on pieces of popular tunes of the Indians' america, seeking the healing magic of sound, the power of finding music by rearranging the Jungian concept of individuation, finding the way to where exactly the dream world of the archetype and art are the preferred way, fruitful and versatile to the archetype.

The archetype of the ancestral melodies, primal uncovered by Johansson, the archetype of Svensson's original compositions that refer prominently to the Swedish folk tradition, the sound of screaming healing Garbarek's saxophone, which seems to recall the shamanic power of music , a work full of deep meanings obvious and less obvious, a continuous weaving in references to the past and projections into the future, out of the damn Cartesian axis which harnesses most of our Western culture, projected in a senseless progressivism.

And it 'perhaps this ethic is felt in every note of Scandinavian musicians, it strikes me that able to resonate the sound ancestral within us, and making it understandable that' difficult to understand how a natural vibration, making the ' soul of the listener a sympathetic chord that vibrates with the archetype expressed by the music played.
And e 'in this parallel, I want to remember Esbjorn Svensson, making him partaker of all, paying tribute to his music, criticized by the usual liberal positivists as "simple" and instead imbued with a pantheistic breath, which takes its origin from the brilliant work and unfortunately little known of what many consider the best talent ever to appear on the European music scene precisely that great Svensson Jan Johansson who shares with the unfortunate fate, the genius' undisputed and attention to the melodic shapes.

On Air Jazz pa svenska