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The vibraphone remains a staple in jazz music, yet within the genre it’s ultimately not a particularly popular instrument. Chicago, for instance, can only boast a handful of serious full-time players—Jason Adasiewicz, Justin Thomas, and Jim Cooper are the ones that spring to mind, and Cooper hasn’t lived in town since the late 90s. Plenty of percussionists include the instrument within their arsenal, but it’s only a part, not the main battery; Adasiewicz and Thomas are part of a relatively recent wave of new voices on the instrument that also includes Chris Dingman, Matt Moran, Warren Wolf, and James Westfall. Europe seems to have an even more serious drought in terms of youngish vibists, which makes the work of Swedish mallet master Mattias Ståhl all the more special. To these ears, he’s as good as any of his American counterparts, and only Adasiewicz—with his aggressive, supersaturated style—can top him in terms of forging new aesthetic models. Ståhl’s tone and style hark back to lesser-known geniuses on the instrument like Teddy Charles and Walt Dickerson, eschewing the wide-open vibrato of Milt Jackson, but his melodic shapes, sense of dynamics, and group interactions are thoroughly modern.
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