Swedish Ballads… & More

Since long before the present flowering of native talent, Scandinavia has been a very jazz-friendly place. Miles Davis borrowed a Swedish folk song and called it Dear Old Stockholm. Quincy Jones wrote one of his first compositions, Stockholm Sweetnin’, there in the 1950s. Both are among the seven numbers on this delectable set by the great American tenor saxophonist and a trio led by Jan Lundgren. Scott Hamilton is famous for the consistent excellence of his playing but this time, sparked by Lundgren’s inspired piano solos and crystal-clear accompaniment, he really surpasses himself. Recorded not in Sweden but the Danish capital of Copenhagen just four months ago the tweedy popular tenorist, looking a little tired in the album artwork but playing as beautifully as ever with that vibrato-laden teasingly laconic sound of his on a ballad, is joined by Lundgren, whose style is closer to Swedish lost leader Jan Johansson than most even if it’s filtered via Wynton Kelly, along with bassist Jesper Lundgaard and drummer Kristian Leth. Lundgren provides the gloss in the notes on the seven tracks that besides ‘Stockholm’ are ‘Swing in F’, ‘You Can’t Be In Love With A Dream’, a big headline-grabbing highlight, ‘Trubbel’, Quincy Jones’ ‘Stockholm Sweetnin’’, ‘Min soldat’ (‘My Soldier’), and very suitably Jan Johansson’s ‘Blues i Oktaver’