Scandinavian Chills
Lars-Göran Ulander, Dans Les Arbres
The Slept-On Brilliance of Swedish Saxophonist Lars-Göran Ulander
In his liner note essay for a terrific archival release of music by Swedish alto saxophonist Lars-Göran Ulander, admirer and fellow reedist Mats Gustafsson recounts, with feverish detail, the first time heard the elder musician, spending multiple paragraphs to explain how the 1982 performance, in which the saxophonist improvised upon a painting by Knut Grane, excited and inspired him. Gustafsson was only 19 at the time, and he was too shy to approach Ulander. Last summer I caught Fire! Orchestra at Jazz em Agosto in Lisbon, and one of the most impressive solos of the evening came from Ulander, who had become a colleague of Gustafsson even while remaining a hero. Ulander is the subject of Öppet Två, the second installment of Gustafsson’s sonic archeology project for Caprice Records. (The first release was devoted to the comparably more chaotic Nisse Sandström). This recent salvo really makes one wonder how Ulander can still be so overlooked and under-documented, although the second descriptor helps explain the first.
In 1963, when Ulander was just 20, he joined a sextet led by trombonist Lars Lystedt in Umeå—the town where Gustaffson was born one year later. Soon after the band recorded a wonderful post-bop album evoking a kind of cool jazz spiked with the weird quasi-exotica ambiance of early Sun Ra titled Jazz Under the Midnight Sun. It’s been reissued here and there over the years, but it deserves a much wider hearing. You can check out the tune “Woodoo,” below. It features particularly fine playing by drummer Sten Öberg and another overlooked titan of Swedish jazz, pianist Berndt Egerbladh, who wrote all of the music. Three years later Ulander was a member of the pianist’s quartet on the ridiculously titled, ridiculously excellent They Laughed At Me When I Sat Down At The Piano - But When I Started To Play...! (Nashville). Ulander continued to play, but he rarely made his way into the studio. Thankfully, we could retroactively hear what he was up to in 1969 when Harald Hult—the infamous proprietor of the legendary Stockholm record store Andra Jazz—released a live recording on his Blue Tower label in 1999, with Ulander supporting a group led by British vocalist Phil Minton, who was still playing trumpet more than singing. Six years later Ulander appeared as part of a killer trio led by the young pianist Per-Henrik Wallin, who had written to the saxophonist about working together. In 1975 they made a superb recording for Dragon, with drummer Peter Olson, titled The New Figaro.
Since Ulander had a full-time job as the head of Swedish radio’s jazz channel, he wasn’t able to perform with much frequency. In fact, it would take another three decades before he turned up on a new recording, when his long overdue debut as a leader surfaced in 2005 with Live at the Glenn Miller Café (Ayler), capturing a fiery trio with veteran bassist Palle Danielsson and upstart drummer Paal Nilssen-Love. The saxophonist appeared at the 2007 iteration of Gustafsson’s Nya Perspektiv festival in Vasteras, Sweden, playing in an improvising group alongside Nilssen-Love, trumpeter Magnus Broo, bassist Per Zanussi, and pianist Marilyn Crispell—it turned up on a Leo CD in 2009. All of these recordings are fantastic, if you can find them, but they also reveal the pitfall of trusting in recordings as the storyline of musicians. Ulander remains far more important and influential than his scant discography would suggest. The newest Ulander recordings arrived on the 2023 Fire! Orchestra album Echoes (Rune Grammofon), while last year he appeared on a pair of tracks from Peaceful Piano (Moserobie), the latest album by the wonderful Nacka Forum, the wonderfully tweaked post-bop quartet featuring saxophonist Jonas Kullhammar, trumpeter Goran Kajfeš, bassist Johan Berthling, and drummer Kresten Osgood. All of this history is here to provide a pinch of context to explain why this new release of Ulander music for the Öppet series is so invaluable.
The first two tracks are played by an Ulander-led sextet that I surely wish had made a record, because these two pieces from 1965 are killing, transmitting a kind of Swedish “New Thing” vibe fully rooted in post-bop but bristling with free jazz openness in the improvisations. Ulander’s solo on his tune “TED” is remarkable, a tightly-coiled statement bristling with tension and terse intervallic motion that reminds of early Archie Shepp. In fact, the almost gauzy horn charts played by Lystedt, trumpeter Ast Boström, and baritone saxophonist Yngve Magnusson suggest Roswell Rudd’s arrangements on Four for Trane, even though they were released the same year. You can hear it below. The second track, “Minus 38 grader Celsius,” was previously released on Caprice’s multi-volume history of Swedish jazz, but it’s nice to hear in its own context. The group, which also included drummer Öberg and bassist Lars-Gunnar Gunnarsson, collides the feel of modal jazz, west coast cool, and the “New Thing” with crackling energy and style. The final track on side A, recorded two years later, is a treatment of “Swampy”—a tune Gabor Szabó brought to Chico Hamilton’s band in 1965—by Lystedt’s Kvintett, but the performance is all about the Ulander solo, as he brings out his innate Ornette Coleman-esque buoyancy with some clear Ayler-esque inflections.
The second side jumps to 1977 with the Per-Henrik Wallin Trio, beginning with a solo excerpt of the saxophonist’s tune “E.V.” that’s full of slashing lines, swing impulses choked, stretched, and reconfigured, and a fluid melodic sensibility gliding through various ups and downs. “Free Tonal Impromptu” is an extended duo improvisation with the pianist, pushing the same openness, harmonic ambiguity, and freeform narratives that made The New Figaro such a classic. The record closes, with Olsen returning to the fold, for a brisk, halting take on the Charlie Parker classic “Moose on the Loose” that inhabits the form like a shell the trio spends seven-minute breaking out of. It’s not too late for Ulander to receive his due.
Dans Les Arbres Get Jaggedy
The dynamic improvising quartet Dans Les Arbres is creeping up on the 20th anniversary of its first album, but it’s hard to imagine this ensemble making a fuss about it. In 2006 the group released that eponymous debut on ECM, with the French clarinetist Xavier Charles finessing a seamless, utterly fluid ensemble sound alongside three Norwegian musicians—percussionist Ingar Zach, guitarist Ivar Grydeland, and keyboardist Christian Wallumrød. From the beginning the quartet embraced an increasingly dominant 21st century model for free improvisation—a practice pioneered by AMM back in the late 60s—turning to a unified mass of sound rather than a meeting of individuals responding or ignoring the machinations of collaborators in real time. The catalog of extended techniques and bespoke noises that each brought to the table has made Dans Les Arbres consistently rewarding as it regularly discovers new ways to blend those elements. Still, I was quite surprised when I first listened to the group’s latest album L’album Vert (Aspen Edities), which was released in December.
As the musicians have developed and shifted their practices individually, it’s only natural that those shifts would work their way into collective efforts, but the dramatically more kinetic sounds really grabbed my attention. Grydeland has been spending more and more time with the pedal steel, preferring to use it as a kind of tabletop analog rather than a melodic instrument known for its eerie sustain and liquid motion, while Wallumrød has steadily enfolded more electronics into his work. And while Zach and Charles are still using the same basic hardware, their soundworlds have evolved, too. I only just noticed that the quartet has digitally released a variety of concert recordings on its Bandcamp page over the last few years, so on Mausoleum, for example, you can hear some of Wallumrød’s electronics entering the fray, but L’album Vert is a much different proposition. All three tracks are distinguished by terse, loosely rhythmic sound tattoos, a kind of crazy off-kilter groove that is irregular, steadily contracting and expanding. Charles toggles between unpitched breaths, striated curlicues, and percussive tongue slapping while Grydeland produces barbed tangles and pitch-bent chording, so it’s Zach and Wallumrød that embrace that more jagged, splattery rhythmic attack, although to be fair, all four of them do circle around to those staccato patterns.
As you can hear on the opening piece “les veux coutent,” there are tones that extend beyond breaths. Halfway through the piece a wavering sustain emerges—maybe a looped pedal steel tone?—but it serves mostly as a kind of binding agent for the swoops, stabs, and spatters. But that’s not to suggest the more isolated sounds wouldn’t mesh or work together without that sustained presence. Indeed, the musicians are still listening closely, fitting those terse gestures together as if solving a jigsaw puzzle exclusively by shape. On the second piece Wallumrød sets the tone with a series of prepared piano motives around which the others orbit and collide, at least until the pianist moves on to something else, a peripatetic quality that connects the group’s oldest work to its most recent. The third and final piece incorporates some comparably loud synth outbursts and carpet bombed beats, adding unexpected tension and some extreme dynamics. Ultimately, the quartet’s modus operandi hasn’t changed much; it remains focused on constructing an elaborate sonic edifice in real time, but rather than building curved structures now Dans Les Arbres is channeling sonic manifestations of impossible objects.
Recommended Shows in Berlin This Week
January 23: Ensemble S (Adam Weisman, Norbert Krämer, Rie Watanabe, Stefan Kohmann, Michael Pattmann, Laurent Warnier, percussion) play Iannis Xenakis’ Persephassa and Alvin Lucier’s Silver Streetcar for the Orchestra, 7 PM, Hamburger Bahnhof, Invalidenstraße 50-51, 10557 Berlin
January 24: Kris Davis Trio (Kris Davis, piano, Robert Hurst, double bass, and Johnathan Blake, drums), 6:30 PM, Zig-Zag Jazz Club, Hauptstraße 89, 12159 Berlin
January 24: Ensemble S (Adam Weisman, Norbert Krämer, Rie Watanabe, Stefan Kohmann, Michael Pattmann, Laurent Warnier, percussion) play Gérard Grisey’s Le noir de l´étoile, 7 PM, Hamburger Bahnhof, Invalidenstraße 50-51, 10557 Berlin
January 24: Ben Lamar Gay (Ben Lamar Gay, cornet, vocals, Mikel Patrick Avery, drums, Sophie Angel, piano, Olula Negre, cello, Macie Stewart, violin, Sam Pluta, live electronics, and Pascal Niggenkemper, double bass), 7:30 PM, Pierre Boulez Saal, Französische Straße 33d, 10117 Berlin
January 24: Alexander von Schlippenbach, piano, Walter Gauchel, saxophones, Rudi Mahall, clarinets, Jan Roder, double bass, and John Schröder, drums, 8:30 PM, Sowieso, Weisestraße 24, 12049 Berlin
January 25: Kantine Musik (Micha Archer, Juliana Perdigao, Dudú Kouate, Cassie Kinoshi, Laurel Pardue, Bex Burch & special guests), 6 PM, Sowieso, Weisestraße 24, 12049 Berlin
January 25: Benjamin Lackner Quintet (Benjamin Lacker, piano, Mathias Eick, trumpet, Maciej Obara, alto saxophone, Harish Raghavan, double bass, and Matthieu Chazarenc, drums), 9 PM, Zig-Zag Jazz Club, Hauptstraße 89, 12159 Berlin
January 26: Heinali & Andriana-Yaroslava Saienko perform Гільдеґарда (Hildegarda); Adela Mede with Marta Forsberg & Nindya Nareswari, 6 PM, CTM Festival, Kuppelhalle, Silent Green, Gerichtstraße 35, 13347 Berlin
January 27: Ash Fure performs Animal; Agustín Genoud performs Songbook of the Apocalypses (Audrey Chen, Anna Clementi, Alessandra Eramo, Nina Guo, Christian Kesten, Elisabetta Lanfredini, Ligia Liberatori, and Ute Wassermann, voices), 7 PM, CTM Festival, Radialsystem V, Holzmarktstrasse 33, 10243 Berlin
When I was growing up music magazines were still going strong. Your posts make me forget the pain of the decline of music journalism. I don’t know how you keep churning them out but please keep it up.