Bobo Stenson Trio

CD version. Sphere is the fourth studio album by the Bobo Stenson Trio with bassist Anders Jormin and drummer Jon Fält, a line-up that has played together since Cantando in 2008. Most of the programme comes from twentieth and twenty-first century composers, Scandinavian above all, with two originals by Jormin. The Swedish pianist plays it with his familiar restraint, building an atmosphere and leaving wide space for his partners.

The album was recorded in April 2022 at the wood-panelled Auditorio Stelio Molo RSI in Lugano and produced by Manfred Eicher. Jormin arranged two of the borrowed pieces, The Red Flower by Jung-Hee Woo and Ky And Beautiful Madame Ky by the Norwegian Alfred Janson. Janson's piece took a new shape in the studio with Eicher, different from the way the trio usually played it. The trio also plays the Valsette op. 40/1 by Jean Sibelius, a short piano piece stretched here to more than five minutes. Stenson has described the group's way of working plainly: "We don't have a way of playing 'ready-made'. Things crystallise in the moment and we adjust to that."

Per Nørgård's You Shall Plant A Tree opens the album and returns at the end in a freer, more percussive variation. Jormin's Kingdom Of Coldness rests on a circular bowed ostinato, while Fält scratches his cymbals and brushes the skins. Sven-Erik Bäck's Communion Psalm opens with right-hand figures that recall choral phrasing, before a bass solo leads into some of the trio's strongest collective playing.

In Jazzwise, Alyn Shipton called Sphere "a powerful introspective album that draws us into a world of intense mutual concentration". Thom Jurek at AllMusic heard it as a mirror image of Contra La Indecisión (2018), which set a few reworked classical pieces among originals, and noted that more than fifty years after his ECM debut as a leader Stenson is still searching. For London Jazz News in 2023, Patrick Hadfield heard the first three tracks run together like movements of one suite, with the silences doing much of the work, and Mike Gates of UK Vibe counted the group among the most elegant trios in Europe.

This is the CD edition, ECM 2775, released on 17 March 2023, in an O-card with a 16-page booklet.