These recordings do, of course, come with more than a tinge of sadness as they are hitherto ‘lost’ solo pieces recorded by Svensson at home before he died in a swimming accident in 2008. He’d recorded them, digitally, onto a hard drive and after his death the hard drive had been left in a bag at the back of the cupboard and lain undisturbed until this year. We have to consider the ‘rightness’ of releasing them. I’ve called them pieces already but some feel more like aural doodles or sketches rather than finished works.
On the scale of
what’s right and wrong they are not as bad as a World Cup in 'Catarrh' but the
question remains to be asked. There have been posthumous releases by the Esbjörn
Svensson Trio (Leucocyte, 301 and Live in London) but in those cases the
other two members of the Trio (Dan Berglund and Magnus Ostrom) were able to
make the decisions about their release.
On the
other side of the scale are the facts that posthumous releases of possibly
unfinished works is no rare thing (just look at the catalogue of Jeff Buckley,
who died in a similar swimming accident 11 years before Svensson) and the
quality of the work. If these were just sketches and noodles the standard of
playing is very high.
So, we
have here 9 tracks, named after the first 9 letters of the Greek alphabet
clocking in at 36 minutes and change. From these humble beginnings follows a
concert, an online event and, next year, a book as well as the album (more
details can be found on Esbjörnsvensson.se ).
And to
the music. The pieces display much of the flare for which Svensson was famous,
both his pensive Evans-ish delicacy and his Tyner-esque percussiveness. The
quieter pieces draw you in; Alpha opens
with an almost quote from Evans’ Peace
Piece that flows into something more powerful as it closes. Beta is all delicacy.
Delta opens
with trills like something from a Regency ball before that percussive left hand
comes into dominate and left and right dance around each other in a quest for domination.
Epsilon is, simply, imperious.
Beautiful, intricate, knotty melodies are worked through rising time and again
to climaxes and then flowing into further intricacy. Listen closely and you can
hear Svensson humming as he plays. (That’s humming, not Jarrett-esque grunts).
Zeta is a
romance for a film and Eta is a folk
dance, again with that solid left hand foundation under melodic frills and
thrills. The closer, Iota, really
encapsulates, in its two and a bit minutes, all that went before. We have that
delicacy and intricacy and a rolling thunder central passage that fades away
leaving a simple melody that takes us to the close.
Is it
right that this should have been released? On balance I think so. The
recordings were completed in the months just before Svensson’s accidental death
and they show the range of his ambition at that stage in his career, suggesting
further classical and folk influences. Some pieces may have stayed as solo
works and others may have been worked up by the Trio but, sadly, we’ll never
know which and how.
HOME.S. is released this Friday Nov. 18, through all the usual channels. Dave Sayer
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