Dan Berglund at the soundcheck yesterday (Picture: Russ Escritt)
CBSO Centre, Birmingham UK
30-03-10
The Swedish double bassist Dan Berglund has done a very clever thing. Of course, his former boss, pianist Esbjorn Svensson, prepared the ground. But all credit to Berglund for taking up the baton and running with it, following Svensson’s death in 2008.
E.S.T. started out as a pretty regular jazz piano trio – they even made a disc of Monk tunes – but increasingly Svensson brought something fresh to their music, feeding his own love of pop into the melodies and rock into the rhythms. So, by the time they were playing large venues in their latter years, the music was much broader than we had come to expect from a jazz piano trio. The audience was broader, too, with a high proportion of fans who probably had more Pink Floyd than Bill Evans albums in their collections.
With Tonbruket, Berglund has moved even further. His drummer, Andreas Werliin doesn’t get anywhere near conventional swing, his guitarist Johan Lindstrom probably listens to more Chet Atkins than Joe Pass (though probably not much to either), and keyboardist Tomas Hallonsten (in for this first UK tour in place of Martin Hederos who plays on the band’s debut album on the ACT label) favours the retro Korg to get those ’70s synth sounds.
The music, too, has little of the old jazz in it – or even the new jazz. While Berglund was often showcased in E.S.T. and played exciting Hendrix-influenced solos on wah-wah, arco bass, here he played very much the fulcrum, allowing Lindstrom to set a lot of the tone with his various guitars.
And various they certainly are, from a couple of acoustics early on in the set (though sounding far from acoustic for much of the time) to pedal steel later on. The latter is one of my favourite instruments, and heard all too rarely. It can never shake its strong country & western flavour , of course, but it is intriguing to sample that flavour in a fusion dish, as it were. The overall effect of Tonbruket’s music for me is to conjure up the strange image of a rather flashily dressed cowboy rocker striding along a bleak, windswept Swedish beach.
In a single 90-minute set and encores, the band played nearly all of the album and added some striking new songs – particularly one called Trackpounder (that cowboy, perhaps?) – taking in quiet delicacy and simple timbral contrasts (Song For E, Wolverine Hoods, Sister Sad, Sailor Waltz), prog-rock thumpers (Monstrous Colossus) and dark mechanistics (Stethoscope, Trackpounder). Some tunes took in all three moods within one piece.
Of course, there might be some who left the gig wondering what those signs saying Birmingham Jazz had to do with any of the music they had heard. But music that prompts that kind of discussion is usually serving a vital purpose right there.
Categories: Live review
thejazzbreakfast 
Hmmm, I certainly don’t think jazz fans would have been at all disappointed with what they heard last night at CBSO. Eclectic and progressive as Tonbrucket’s music is, the jazz undertones are still there very strongly. Even e.s.t.’s latter music was becoming very much ambient experimentation. I am so encouraged that Dan has come back so strongly and in such a unique way post Esbjorn. I had a huge grin on my face from beginning to end. An awesome concert.