Huge Tip! ** Edition of 300.** The long overdue first proper jazz album on Discreet Music! After years of releasing experimental electronics, drone, and avant-garde sound art, the Swedish label finally documents what's been happening in their own backyard: ferocious, life-elevating free jazz performed by three of Sweden's leading improvisers. Niklas Persson Trio - saxophonist Niklas Persson, double bassist Patric Thorman, and drummer Raymond Strid - started ten years ago on Thorman's initiative. For years, they met and played casually at Strid's home in Heby, working out their approach away from audiences and expectations, developing the chemistry that only comes from sustained collaboration. Now, recorded live at the FRIM festival at Teater Tribunalen in August 2024, they finally unveil their first powerful statement.

Thirty-five minutes. That's all they need. The trio blasts on with highly energetic free jazz that works in "the emotive spirit of Eric Dolphy" - that combination of rigorous intelligence and raw feeling, harmonic sophistication and melodic directness that made Dolphy's music so compelling. There are echoes of Anthony Braxton too - the systematic approach to structure, the way composition and improvisation blur into a single continuous process. But this isn't American free jazz transplanted to Scandinavia. The Niklas Persson Trio has its own identity, a distinctive Scandinavian touch that's harder to define but impossible to miss. Maybe it's something in the tonal palette, the way silence and space function within the intensity. Maybe it's a certain Nordic restraint even in full-throttle moments. Maybe it's just the accumulated experience of musicians steeped in a particular creative culture. The pedigrees matter. These aren't newcomers testing the waters - they're veterans who've been active with Gush (the legendary Swedish free jazz trio), Kvintetten Som Sprängdes (roughly: "The Quintet That Exploded"), Brända Broar ("Burnt Bridges"), and Roland Keijser's various projects. They bring decades of experience to this music, which paradoxically makes it sound fresh rather than studied. They know the tradition well enough to ignore it when necessary. Raymond Strid deserves special mention. His home in Heby became the incubator for this trio, and his drumming - as anyone familiar with Swedish free music knows - combines power and precision, propulsion and punctuation. He's equally comfortable laying down furious polyrhythms and dropping into near-silence, understanding that free jazz drums aren't just about energy but about shaping space and time.

Pressed in an edition of 300 copies with artwork by Gustaf Dicksson, Live at Teater Tribunalen stands as both debut statement and evidence of a decade's worth of work. The first proper jazz album on Discreet Music, and hopefully not the last. Swedish free jazz is alive, burning bright, elevating life through sound.