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Stackenäs joins Jernberg as a member of the New Songs, a daring quartet that also features French pianist Eve Risser and Norwegian guitarist Kim Myhr. The group’s fantastic debut album, A Nest at the Junction of Paths (Umlaut), showcases many of the things that make Jernberg so unique. If Seval is a pop band of improvisers, New Songs is an art song project of improvisers; Jernberg and Risser wrote all of the music. The singer possesses remarkable pitch control, guiding her crystalline voice through all sorts of swoops, intervals, and wordless flurries. While she rarely cycles through the melodies without radically transforming them at every pass, she doesn’t needlessly draw attention to herself either. Whether embroidering or radically reinventing written themes or deploying a huge arsenal of extended techniques, Jernberg’s machinations always feel tightly woven into the fabric of whatever project she’s involved with. The instrumentalists that surround her also follow suit, improvising heavily along the loose composed patterns and interacting with one another at a very high level, but never grandstanding. Below you can check out one of the singer’s pieces, “Reality Had a Little Weight.”
Jernberg is also a core member of the excellent Paavo, an ensemble she leads with Swedish pianist Cecilia Persson; its third and latest album, The Third Song of the Peacock (Found You), strips down the usual chamber ensemble to just a trio, with Jernberg and Persson joined by the marvelous reedist Fredrik Ljungkvist, whose band Yun Kan 10 includes the singer. Jernberg wrote most of the music, and her tunes again dance around the boundaries of jazz, pop, and art song; the melodies are graceful and sophisticated, with unerring commentary and support from her collaborators, and the singer’s articulation is perfect. She takes some greater liberties here as an improviser—as you can hear below on the album opener “Correct Behaviour” she shows off her more extroverted side, but again, it fits the performance, which at times suggests what Bjork might sound like as a cabaret singer. The package also includes an excellent DVD featuring live performances by the full group—trumpeter Strandberg, Ljungkvist, reedists Nils Berg, Thomas Backman, and Marcelo Gabard Pazos, bassist Clas Lassbo, and drummer Gustav Nahlin—in various combinations.
Strandberg also turns up on another collaborative album with Thorman and pianist Sten Sandell—a single 33-minute free improvisation recorded live at Stockholm’s Fylkingen last September called It Is Right and I Am Lost (Found You). Chicagoans have heard Sandell in numerous contexts—whether it was his killer trio with Mats Gustafsson and Raymond Strid called Gush or in solo mode, where sometimes he accents his own turbulent, brooding lines with throat singing—but here with the trumpeter’s lyric voice his playing feels less weighty. Below you can check out an excerpt of the first six minutes of the album.
