Onkyo Proudly Presents Jonas Hellborg

Jonas Hellborg is a Swedish bass guitarist. He has collaborated with John McLaughlin, Ustad Sultan Khan, Fazal Qureshi, Bill Laswell, Shawn Lane, Jens Johansson, Anders Johansson, Michael Shrieve, V. Selvaganesh, Jeff Sipe, Mattias IA Eklundh, Public Image Ltd, and Buckethead.

Newly re-discovered studio recording by the formidable trio of Hellborg-Baker- Worrell. This ensemble made several European tours in the late 80's. Worrell had at the time just finnished the Talking Heads, Stop Making Sense project, Ginger was living in Tuscany Italy farming olives and painting. This project brought him out of retirement from playing concerts. An exciting exploration of genre bending music performed by 3 legendary musicians.

This is an intriguing and rather original set of music. Jonas Hellborg, whose conception of the acoustic bass guitar is much closer to a guitar than to a bass, teams up with drummer Tony Williams and the flexible Soldier String Quartet. The sparse sextet explores songs that (according to the liners) are influenced by Arab music, Jimi Hendrix, Tony Williams' Lifetime and Bartok. A variety of moods are explored and the unusual blend of instruments and styles grow in interest each time they are heard. It is a pity though that the playing time is less than 37 minutes.

Those familiar with the respective musicians discographies might normally expect this affair to be a turbocharged, jazz/fusion set also featuring wacko, prog metal type characteristics. Such is not the case with this production, as these artists opt for the "unplugged" route. On the other hand, there's no lack of excitement here, as this acoustic-based power trio generates quite a bit of momentum in concert with a few ethereally enacted dreamscapes. On this release, Jonas Hellborg uses a custom made acoustic bass guitar. The electrified and generally dazzling, heavy metal-like inclinations of guitarist Buckethead are tempered into an acoustic format here, as drummer Michael Shrieve lays down a series of torrid backbeats to complement his hard-hitting, polyrhythmic fills.

What may seem odd on paper makes more sense in sonic terms: the trio of bassist Jonas Hellborg, guitarist Shawn Lane and virtuosic South Indian udu player V. Selvaganesh works up a kind of sensitive fury in the zone where Indo-jazz-rock and cross-cultural ambient concepts meet. John McLaughlin (with whom Hellborg played way back when) has been here before, the mixture of fusion and classical Indian materials. In the case of this group, it comes in the form of harmonic vocabulary from rock, and rhythms that lean towards the suppleness and intricacy from the Carnatic side of things.

This album is a distinctive, spontaneous collaboration between Swedish jazz bassist Jonas Hellborg, the famous sarangi maestro Ustad Sultan Khan, and Indian percussionist Fazal Qureshi. The whole album has a dark, groovy funk element with Indian styles incorporated in a truly experimental way that's never been heard before. Surely, an album like this can give way to more improvisational music with musicians collaborating across boundaries.

Jonas Hellborg launches a new platform for integration of east and west, a project called Art Metal. Borrowing the aesthetic of contemporary metal expanded with Indian and jazz improvisational disciplines, it is a proposal for what a new musical canvas could be. With long time collaborator, South Indian percussion master Selvaganesh, he explores this new path with two legends of the metal scene, Jens Johansson (Yngwie Malmsteen, Dio, Stratovarius) and Anders Johansson (Yngwie Malmsteen and Hammerfall). Completing the ensemble is Swedish guitar phenomenon Mattias IA Eklundh. The music has been slowly brewed over 18 months to find the spaces where the elements of the seemingly disparate musical traditions can comfortably coexist, even gel into new forms of sonic art.

Jonas Hellborg launches a new platform for integration of east and west, a project called Art Metal. Borrowing the aesthetic of contemporary metal expanded with Indian and jazz improvisational disciplines, it is a proposal for what a new musical canvas could be. With long time collaborator, South Indian percussion master Selvaganesh, he explores this new path with two legends of the metal scene, Jens Johansson (Yngwie Malmsteen, Dio, Stratovarius) and Anders Johansson (Yngwie Malmsteen and Hammerfall). Completing the ensemble is Swedish guitar phenomenon Mattias IA Eklundh. The music has been slowly brewed over 18 months to find the spaces where the elements of the seemingly disparate musical traditions can comfortably coexist, even gel into new forms of sonic art.

This group from Germany played an innovative blend of jazz-rock in the early 1970s. Their debut album is often compared with very early Kraftwerk and Organisation, and their links with Kraftwerk go back to the late 1960s. In 1987 Waldemar Karpenkel, Dapper, and Schrumpf reformed the group with famed Swedish bassist Jonas Hellborg and keyboardist Thomas Bettermann and released the album Kollektiv Featuring Jonas Hellborg the next year.