Swedish Jazz History

AVID Jazz presents four classic Quincy Jones albums plus including original LP liner notes on a finely re-mastered and low priced double CD. To quote Quincy from the original liner notes “This Is How I Feel About Jazz is an attempt to supply settings, select the proper cast and musically portray my feelings about some of the less cerebral and more vital or basic elements contained in Jazz.

Ubuntu Music is delighted to announce the signing of composer/arranger/instrumentalist Martin Sjöstedt & Stockholm Jazz Orchestra, for the release of a major big band project of original and interpreted compositions.

Following on from the successful 1950’s cool jazz and bop excursions in “Kind of Cool”, “Kind of Spain” is again with an 100% acoustic band. Traditional Spanish music meets jazz. The vibe created by this sextet is introvert, warm and atmospheric, and the listener’s mind might easily drift off… to a roof terrace somewhere in Granada by night, perhaps.

Jazz on life and death! In There Is No Future, Swedish jazz singer Sara Aldén makes her album debut with self-written music and arranged jazz standards with a focus on grand crescendos and vulnerable intimacy. She creates jazz as if her life depended on it where the question of the end of everything is allowed to exist, the small endings and the big ones. Sara Aldén and her trio present a musical sinkhole in the ongoing history of jazz, where doom-filled and intimate compositions alternate with dizzying arpeggios and dystopian and lyrical sound worlds.

Swedish jazz-pianist Jan Johansson (1931-1968) was a musician with a distinctively courageous sense of combining several styles of music, blending jazz and folk music into his own voice. With his characteristically light touch on the piano, Johansson created a unique and melancholic sound which many listeners associate with Nordic identity and history.
On September 16th 2021 Jan Johansson would have turned 90.

This is the long-awaited second album from Swedish jazz pianist Emil Ingmar, building on the critically acclaimed debut album from 2020.

The quartet of the Berlin saxophonist and composer Birgitta Flick is a band with a unique magic that has been playing together for 10 years. This familiarity, which is particularly important for a group that relies so heavily on improvisation, is also heard on the new, fourth album “Miniatures and Fragments” from the Birgitta Flick Quartet.

Magnus Hjorth is no longer a “promising young” pianist – that is in the past. He has been called one of “Scandinavia’s sparkling piano talents”, but BLUE INTERVAL catapults him into the international league. Once again, he delights us with his tight trio in a repertoire of originals and astounding interpretations of Glenn Miller hits and a surprising version of Charlie Parker’s “Barbados”. Originally from Sweden, but now residing in Denmark with his wife and child, the 31-year old Hjorth has developed into an out standing pianist. Whether playing originals or covering more or less well-known tunes, he stays connected to jazz history with equal measures of taste and originality. He no longer feels the need to show off his great technique, but holds our attention with explosive and groovy playing and an exquisite talent for merging jazz tradition and swinging modernism into a sophisticated sound.

Esbjörn Svensson is certainly one of the most influential musicians in modern jazz history. Now "HOME.S." is his first solo album, released 14 years after his tragic accidental death while diving.