Mattias Ståhl and Fredrik Ljungkvist deliver gems for Moserobie's 20th year

Mattias Ståhl (photo: Peter Gannushkin/downtownmusic.net)

Swedish saxophonist Jonas Kullhammar founded Moserobie Records nineteen years ago primarily to disseminate his own work but it didn’t take long before it became a key platform for jazz and improvised music from all over his homeland and its neighbor Norway. For twenty years the imprint has maintained a remarkably high level of quality, and over the course of 120 titles it’s introduced loads of impressive musicians from Scandinavia. Kullhammar has developed a reliable network of collaborators and colleagues, and he’s trusted his sharp ears in guiding Moserobie over two decades. His aesthetic is rooted in post-bop and he rarely strays outside of hard-swinging music, but within his chosen parameters he’s released a wide range of terrific stuff, and in 2019 he’s dropped some of the strongest work yet from a familiar cast. 

I’ve long been a strong admirer of vibraphonist Mattias Ståhl, who’s judicious with releasing music as a leader. Despite the paucity of his such endeavors he’s maintained his standing as one of the most beguiling practitioners on his instrument for almost as long as Moserobie has existed, heralding a new wave of young vibists at the turn of the century. His superb new trio album Kålltorp Sessions, Volume One is its first in six years, but his group with bassist Joe Williamson and drummer Christopher Cantillo makes up for lost time. On the other hand, this year the vibist also released a terrific duo album with veteran bassist Georg Riedel—with trumpeter Staffan Svensson sitting in on a few tracks--called Diokrati (Diesel Music).

Ståhl plays with a rare concision and clarity, qualities only enhanced by the trio format, and he eschews the heavy vibrato of Milt Jackson in favor of the purer sound mastered by Walt Dickerson back in the 1960s. The music delivers a wonderfully spiky edge deliberately pocked by an appealing clank in the playing of Cantillo, who provides a balance to the sweetness of the vibraphone. On the leader’s opener “Elmers” a warm, swerving melody progresses in fits, gliding between silences while buffeted by the drums (You can listen to it, below). Williamson, naturally, holds it all together with a deep, woody bottom. Four of the recording’s nine tracks are collaborative pieces—I’m not sure if they’re freely improvised efforts, which speaks to the trio’s cohesion and it’s collective spontaneity. One such piece is “Kvotblues,” which opens with inn scurrying fashion, with each player scrambling for solid ground, which is discovered through a simple, seductive ostinato forged by the bassist. Ståhl devises a series of melodic shards that drape over that armature brilliantly, while the drummer toggles between flow and chaos. On another, “Lev Som Vanligt Bara,” Williamson again provides the foundation, this time dragging a needling line into stasis, cleaving the piece open and shutting it down twice. Yet whether the material is open-ended or composed, there’s a deeply satisfying logic and cogency to the proceedings, as the trio probes hard without every losing sight of coherent construction. There a couple of pieces not written by the group including a lightning-fast reading of “Diagram” by Riedel, harkening to bebop with a harmonic freedom that feels very fresh, while a loving take on John Lennon’s “Jealous Guy” dispenses with any archness, as the trio leans into its vibe with a loping rhythm that allows Ståhl to eat up the relaxed melody. It’s a record disarming on its surface modesty, but this is some deep shit, and the connection between the musicians is unmistakable.

Just a few weeks ago the label issued Atlantis by the Fredrik Ljungvkist Trio. The leader is well known for his lengthy participation in the Scandinavian quintet Atomic—where he and pianist Håvard Wiik compose all of the material—but over his career he’s fronted a number of disparate projects, each producing a very distinctive sound. He played a great collective trio with drummer Raymond Strid and bassist Johan Berthling that embraced a more, open improvisatory approach, while his own bands like Yun Kan 5 and Yun Kan 10 were more composition-oriented, with structures and arrangements that veered well outside of post-bop terrain. Ljungvkist is a masterful reedist, but his curiosity has generally led him away from straight-ahead contexts, which makes the appearance of Atlantis so welcome. It’s not as if he’s suddenly lost his edge or explorative drive, but I’ve been thrilled to sit through a full album where displays his talents on tunes that keep it relatively simple and swing.

Mattias Welin, Fredrik Ljungkvist, Jon Fålt

The title track, which you can check out below, is hardly simple—its corkscrewing melody reminds me of Jimmy Giuffre’s iconic early 60s trio with Paul Bley and Steve Swallow in it’s tight-knit cohesion and peripatetic episodes—but with drummer Jon Fält and bassist Mattias Welin deftly sculpting the grooves, keeping their accompaniment sleek and unobtrusive, we can really bask in the way the leader constructs one of his magnificent solos. He kneads each motif, reshaping melodic variations, and exploits his full tonal palette, whether guttural snorts to altissimo sallies, in a wide-ranging, fluid improvisation unencumbered by other players or elaborate arrangements. It’s also great to hear him tackle a tune like “Monk’s Dream”—where the trio is expanded by the presence of the young pianist Max Agnas—where he toggles between lithe, airy phrases and bluesy, earthy ones, moving between them without a hiccup and embarks on a thrilling, unexpected double-time sprint. On his “Rue Oberkampf,” with a melody partially cribbed from “Cherokee,” the saxophonist luxuriates in his rich, full-bodied tone—blowing over the rhythm section’s delicious. halting mid-tempo figures with a massive sound that gathers steam and detail only to descend from the crescendo with exquisite grace.

The agile singer Sofia Jernberg doubles the melody of “Jag vet inte” with typically fluid wordless vocals on before she and the Ljungvkist’s plush baritone embark on a loose-limbed but wonderfully interactive dialogue, while his “Flykt” features an infectious skipping groove, with a sturdy, propulsive Welin solo and typically varied accents by Fält, who is the session’s secret weapon. It’s a damn shame the drummer’s not known better outside of Europe. Ljungvkist plays a stunning solo version of “So-Do-So-Do-Re,” a tune by the Swedish saxophonist Roland Keijser, who passed away in January, a few months before the recording was made. It registers as a profound homage, coming from a musician with a deep knowledge and reverence for the music’s history—Ljungkvist studied with Keijser, and the album is dedicated to his memory. Speaking of history, the album concludes with a spin on the Bill Evans tune “Very Early,” from the 1962 trio album Moon Beams, and, turning to clarinet, Ljungkvist is joined by pianist Göran Strandberg—another vet who spent years in Red Mitchell’s Communication and has released scads of his own recordings—in the most traditional performance on the album, rounding out this assessment of his roots in sublime fashion.

Today’s playlist:

Otto, Ottomatopeia (Pommelo)

Peter Blegvad, Go Figure (ReR)

Drinks, Hippo Lite (Drag City)

Kim Myrh, You|Me (Hubro)

Anna & Elizabeth, The Invisible Comes to Us (Smithsonian/Folkways)