Ida Sand

A rare musical talent and a natural beauty with a radiant smile and golden red hair. With the gospel in her soul, pure gold in her voice and soul in her body and yet, she is from Sweden of all places. Born into a musical family, the father a singer at the Royal Opera in Stockholm and the mother a church musician, Ida has been surrounded by music and the love for it her whole life and you can certainly hear it in her performance.
These recordings show Ida Sand's full potential. Meet Me Around Midnight is an album by a singer who pays a lot of attention to the arrangement of each individual song. The arranging focuses on the groove, interpreted differently for each of the 13 songs by Ida and her excellent band. Dark and menacing in her original "Brutal Truth", or with ample blues feeling in the standard "One For My Baby"…

Christmas 2020 will be unlike the Christmases of the past, because the Covid-19 crisis and social distancing have fundamentally changed the way we live. Maybe they will also make us yearn more for the true spirit and the joys of Christmas. As we reflect and contemplate on what is important to us, we know that we want to keep hold of our sense of friendship and community. We feel a strong imperative to reach out for whatever can bring joy to the world. And with that thought in mind, there can surely be very few people who can gift-wrap the Christmas season in music for us – and do so quite as naturally, effectively and magically – as Nils Landgren.

Christmas without the songs – it's unthinkable. And yet how can one be open to different musical styles and also strike a good balance between them? How can all the right moods for the festive season be captured? Should it be classical or soulful, gospel or pop, blues or jazz? The result can often be just one style of singing from one person – but that’s not the case with Nils Landgren's "Christmas With My Friends". A sequence which would normally have had to be patched together from a wide range of interpreters is all there, and from just the one source. Alongside the Swedish trombonist/singer himself, there are four vocalists, Jeanette Köhn, Ida Sand, Jessica Pilnäs and Sharon Dyall, and their fundamentally different voices allow them to combine many musical genres. The way these four co-exist so harmoniously is just one of the reasons why "Christmas With My Friends" has proved to be quite so popular and successful over the past twelve years. Accompanied by Eva Kruse on bass, Johan Norberg on guitar, and saxophonist Jonas Knutsson, the ensemble reinterprets Christmas songs from all over the world and in a jazz spirit, bringing together the well-known with the less familiar, combining the cheerful with the contemplative.