Tuesday, July 05, 2005

More Swedish goodness

Sweden produces a lot of great jazz and one Swedish musician I'm partial to is the multi-instrumentalist Magnus Lindgren, whose quartet CD "The Game" I bought on a whim in Stockholm. (Ironically, I got to hear him in person the same night, at the Nobel Prize banquet. No, I didn't win. They don't give a Nobel for beer drinking. I was covering the Nobels as a newspaper reporter.)

Lindgren plays tenor sax, bass clarinet and flute, alto flute and bass flute on this disk with a pianist, bassist and drummer in what is a tradition-rooted but pretty adventurous session often bordering on avant-garde. He reminds me of Coltrane in spots and Wayne Shorter in a lot of places. The majority of the songs are originals and the rest are interesting takes on standards such as "Softly as in a Morning Sunrise" and "Caravan." This has become one of my favorite CDs.

No comments: