Drummer, visual artist and one of the original European free jazz players, Sven-Åke Johansson was never willing to settle for a single route of exploration. As a musician and composer he appeared on key recordings for the legendary FMP, delivered marine weather reports for Edition Telemark, crooned love songs for Ultra Eczema and was at the heart of the recent free music revival in Berlin via Umlaut alongside Joel Grip and Axel Dörner. “My work is not actually jazz, but rather the exploration of sounds,” he said. “In that sense, my music defies some categorizations. Jazz is only a small part of what I do”.

When asked to play at OTO last year, Johansson proposed two nights with four musicians half his age - alto saxophonist Seymour Wright, his fellow [Ahmed] member and double bassist Joel Grip, and French alto saxophonist Pierre Borel. Grip and Borel both played alongside Johansson in Stumps; Wright had previously recorded a trio with Johansson and Grip almost a year earlier in Johansson’s Berlin studio - due to be released later in the year via We Jazz as The Jazzy Stork. A quartet of two saxophones, bass and drums sounds like jazz, but all four players perpetually reach outside of the genre for inspiration.

Opening disc one, Grip’s and Wright’s staccato melodies are drawn delicately together with the lightest of threads, little playful buzzrolls and tom taps: if this is jazz it's the gentlest sort we’ve heard in some time. Grip and Wright stretch a handful of notes over a trickle of toms, the room thick with listening. For his next act, Johansson changes tack, bringing out his accordion. Like his frequent collaborator Rüdiger Carl, Johansson's work on the accordion is full of expression and humor - his sometimes short, pointillistic improvisations suddenly cohere into brief melodies that flicker with nostalgia. Grip picks up a swing, and the quartet head out on a warm adventure before the saxophones and accordion satisfyingly drift out of the room together. 

It feels important to mention Sven-Åke Johansson dressed sharply. He was a man of intention with a touch of melodrama and it kept his music from drying out. Amidst the great volume of German Free Music in the 1970s, Johannson's first solo LP ‘Schlingerland’ (1972) swishes cymbal and snare, tom and hi-hat, sometimes almost imperceptibly. Skin, metal, plastic and wood, always in a tank of developer; quite melodic, beautifully concentrated. In Borel, Grip and Wright, there are no better gradual investigators of this kind of music. All three can shred jazz into its microparts, can swing, can groove and shriek. Here, buoyed by Johannason’s light touch, a sort of minimalist bebop emerges - the last track dividing and multiplying melodic fragments until certain motifs print the inside of your skull. It’s totally luxury music, full freedom, full commitment. If it doesn't hit the first time, you’re sure to come back for it. We’re blessed it was recorded and grateful to have shared in this music.