Significant Time with Signe Irene Time, vocals and synthesizers, Oyvind Dale, piano and synthesizers, Fredrik Luhr Dietrichson, bass and Raymond Storaunet Lavik, drums and percussion.
Øyvind Dale, who writes most of the music for Significant Time, has a knack for curious song titles, and on their third album, Ekstatisk eufori (2025), he has taken it all in.
It was also from this album that most of the concert repertoire was taken. Only one song from the debut album Regnbueponniens Significant Easter Song (2016) had made it, and strangely enough, the second album Vossastubbar (2023) was not represented at all.
The concert began and ended with “Very nice song … what about making it nice? (really nice) …» Maybe not everyone will think that the song title is comprehensive, but this circular compositional technique worked well. Dale lays a chord sequence on top of a long-lasting pressure swirl from Lavik and Luhr Dietrichson and Time hektar himself on the chord sequence.
Then followed the title song «Blablabla … ecstatic euphoria (if there is even such a thing as that?)» … with fine details in the interplay between bass and drums. «Here and there … what word was Dr. Frost using again? Yes! eclectic it was …» promising fine choruses from both Luhr Dietrichson and Dale.
«Bonding with My Body» is taken from the debut album and gives Time the opportunity to present the theme and improvise over it with a strong blues touch.
By the time the concert was over they had been through all ten songs on Ekstatic Euphoria, a real roller coaster of changing tempos and moods where open harmonic and loose rhythmic were combined with clear shapes and structures.
The concert was spiced up with the lovely ballad “And The Girl Replies: … Laura I Know How (sic!) Killed You …” and the swinging “Nichols And Dimes … Seeing You/See Me”. If the synthesizers had been removed from the instrumentation, I would not have protested … Otherwise, Dale is an original composer and lyricist that Vossa Jazz should consider for a future piece and as a soloist he is making steady progress. The solo he had on “4262 Avaldsnes … kan måde jeg seiler min skute på grund … men det er dyk so delikl å fare! (H. Ibsen)” was simply overwhelming!
Voss jazz club ended the spring season in the best way. For the fall, the stage is set for concerts in Osasalen at the Ole Bull Academy in anticipation of a long-awaited renovation of the Old Cinema.
When the editor of this medium almost a year ago reviewed the album Traces by the quintet Cosmic Ear, he wrote “… until the day I can hear this song in concert, with Jernberg as a guest”. This Saturday we experienced the quintet’s Norwegian debut, admittedly without Sofia Jernberg, but with the great tribute to her in place. It was about time.
This album, and the concert this Saturday, draw the big and long lines. These are lines that have their long roots wedged into Swedish jazz history, The longest hair roots extend back to the environment in and around the musician organization Emanon based in Stockholm, where the new Scandinavian jazz has its hotbeds.
It was the environment around which the American musicians and sources of inspiration George Russell and Don Cherry met, both in Stockholm and in Oslo. A new Swedish and Scandinavian jazz grew out of this, and this constitutes a kind of foundation for today’s band.
The quintet Cosmic Ear features Christer Bothén on bass clarinet, piano and donso n’goni, the West African hunter’s harp, Goran Kajfes on trumpet, synth and electronics, Mats Gustafsson on tenor saxophone, flute, recorders, electronics and synth, Kansan Zetterberg on double bass and Juan Romero on congas, berimbau and other perks.
The album name Traces points back to this story: With a cosmic ear one can pick up the traces of Don Cherry, and the other external influences from which the young Swedish jazz of the 1960s and 1970s sprang. The signals of this story are now around fifty to sixty light years out in the Milky Way: They have long since passed the Dog Star, Sirius, 8-9 light years away.
Vega in the constellation Lyra heard remnants of this music while the audience was enjoying the Olympic games in Lillehammer. Castor, named after one of the twins, is actually a system of six stars. Here they were able to pick up the signals from 1970 just before a virus that resembled a clove-studded orange spread to our part of the world.
In a couple of years, Aldebaran – the Bull’s horn, or eye, will be able to hear the first notes from the jazz concerts at the Moderna Museet in Stockholm in 1963-64. With these concerts, the musicians’ organization Emanon laid the foundation for much of the development and renewal of Scandinavian jazz that was to take place over the next ten years. The first jazz concert at Emanon was on October 7, 1963, ushering in the new era. The rest is history.
But we don’t need to embark on a long journey to Aldebaran. We hear the memories of this and the subsequent music over and over again. We know the history and we love it. And when the quintet Cosmic Ear draws the lines and traces back to this time, and shows that the music is still lively and captivating, we are happy. Because we don’t need to travel any further than this cave in the center of Oslo, to the National Jazz Stage in the old cinema and variety venue that bears the name Victoria.
The venue that was given the name Victoria Teater – whether it was after Hamsun’s novel character from 1898 or the former Norwegian-Swedish Crown Princess Victoria, I don’t know. Perhaps the origin is the short-lived Victoria Theater that was located where the Central Theatre is located – opened 111 years ago, on March 20, 1915. But this we do know: Anyone who knows their Tolkien, knows that the eleventh birthday is a milestone. A little overtime, we are therefore marking this big day for this venue, with fantastic music.
It was at the opening in C.W. Blomqvist’s former venue for art exhibitions, one of the city’s largest cinemas with 500 seats. Today, there is hardly anything left of the old cinema venue except stucco and lighting equipment on the ceiling.
After the renovation in the 1980s and later, there is now room for 300 in the venue. Today’s audience is far from this, but according to the information I received, it is estimated at just 90. It should have been double that – at least.
Goran Kajfes’ “Father and Son”, which is on the album, is a beautiful journey into Swedish jazz history. A longer free stretch, where Kajfes and Gustafsson draw up large landscapes with their electronic aids. Before Christer Bothén’s “Right Here, Right Now” anchors us in the moment, in a here-and-now. With n’goni we feel the heat rising, the blood rising. Now we know that this is going to be good. It is the sound of the good times, of the golden times. Of the time when the world was new.
The collective shines, radiates. There is a captivating joy in the music that clarifies the tracks. Ornette Coleman said it, “you have to be able to play all the clefs”, when he was explaining his harmolodic theories to his colleagues. What he meant, few really understood. But there is no doubt that it became beautiful music. A different music, a new music.
This is harmolodia in Swedish. Because Swedish it is, and Swedish it will be. Whatever they take in, these five, it will become Swedish music. Swedish traditions. Art Ensemble of Stockholm, as one commented. But first of all: Don lives!
“Drops of Sorrow” – Bothén back on his bass clarinet. This one is not on the record, “and, now comes a new one,” says Gustafsson. An insistent bass line with an A at the bottom from Zetterberg, Gustafsson on clarinet over Kajfes’ urban soundscape, before Kajfes on trumpet soars over the music. Romero with dance in percussive circles. But then, Bothén shows the way into the music, a calm, expectant one. With Socratic calm and compassion, he sits in the middle of the stage as the all-father, as the sage, as a guide and shaper. As an inspiration.
Don Cherry’s “Love Train”. Bothén sits down at the piano, just as he did when Cherry et alii Suecice recorded what was released as Eternal Now in 1973. The ostinato, vamped, goes on and on. It doesn’t come to the door, but ends up in our ears. Right where it belongs. Wonderful, and refreshingly different from the record.
With traces of Don Cherry’s “Brown Rice” from the album of the same name, with Charlie Haden, Billy Higgins and Frank Lowe traces of brown rice. With Moki on tambura. And Moki’s blanket on at least some of the editions – Om Mani Padme Hum – ॐ मणि पद्मे हून, – I praise the jewel in the lotus flower – the jewel, mani, in the lotus, padme, is the path to yourself. It points in Tibetan Buddhism to the bodhisattva Chenrézig, who in his Sanskrit incarnation, had this as his mantra. It is an expression of karunā, for care, compassion, safeguarding. Chenrézig sees everything and everyone, with care and compassion in his gaze. Brown rice with berimbau and n’goni. Could it taste better?
The transition to the next is speisa, like the music on the radio’s shortwave, the sound of cosmic radiation that comes with its ears and will pick up the traces of this concert. Then the new “Trans Love Airways”, which ends the regular part of the concert. Organic Music, he called it. Organic, nutritious, and free of additives that start with E from here to the moon, and of pesticides.
Then of course we get an ordinary extraordinary performance, an encore, a number presented encore, a French contraction of in hanc horam, from medieval Latin, ‘to/in this time’.
Swedish jazz still delivers, organic, real, alive. Plug up your ear canals in your cosmic ear and listen to the music from Cosmic Ear. If the world still works as it should, which is far from certain these days, then Cosmic Ear should be heard at festivals and clubs in every nook and cranny of the Nordic continent, and across the entire Baltic shield. Rejoice, Don lives! Cherry is still at his best.
