Resonansium Records
Göran Strandberg has a long history with Swedish jazz; since the early 1970s with Red Mitchell, Bernt Rosengren, Dexter Gordon, Lee Konitz, the Stockholm Jazz Orchestra, and the Norrbotten Big Band.
As a composer, Strandberg doesn’t deal in mirror works or clearly marked positions. In his playing, there’s a quiet, almost meditative sense of exploration. In 2021, the first album with this trio—bassist Svante Söderqvist and drummer Peter Danemo—was released.
On the follow-up Hello!, Strandberg asks: How do you get from one point to another? Freestyle? Along a path? Or with GPS—the initials of the trio’s building blocks.
Piano, bass, drums in a position entirely their own. There are slight accents of others, traces from the archive, but the idiom is unique. Perhaps Göran Strandberg is laying out subtle clues like calling cards across the terrain. As in the composition Olivier. I sense the shadows of the unique composer and modernist Messiaen.
With the Göran Strandberg Trio, the music is constantly shifting and rich in nuance. A finely woven tapestry of sounds, with rhythmic undercurrents breaking the surface. A piece like October, accompanied by Peter Danemo’s snare work, brings to mind Jan Johansson’s deconstructions—long before the concept became trendy. A piano trio, yes, but on new ground.
—Magnus Östnäs – Lira, May 23, 2025
Gläntan / Resonansium / Vägen
Resonansium Records
Peter Danemo is a skilled and versatile drummer and composer—apparently also quite good at holding on to his music for a long time. From his drawer, he now brings out three recordings that have never been released on album before.
Gläntan is a commissioned work consisting of five pieces that Danemo composed in 2019 on behalf of Swedish Radio P2. Here, nine musicians from both jazz (Joakim Milder, Britta Virves, Christian Spering, and Danemo himself) and classical backgrounds come together. The music is often subdued and beautiful, featuring woodwinds (saxophones, flutes, and clarinets) and strings (violin and cello), as well as percussion, in addition to piano, double bass, and drums. The Thing is reminiscent of a jazz ballad, with lovely solos on bass, sax, and piano, while The Twelve is marked by greater tension and brief, dynamic horn phrases before Milder lets loose in a powerful soprano sax solo.
A few years earlier, Danemo composed music for the Norrbotten Big Band. Not everything he wrote made it onto the album at the time, but on the record Resonansium, we now hear four previously unreleased pieces from a 2016 live recording, with the composer conducting.
I assume the opening track Ember wasn’t included in the original release simply because it runs a full eighteen minutes—there’s certainly no lack of quality here. It’s an exciting journey through a soundscape seasoned with Danemo’s live electronics, where the horns truly get to display a wide palette of tonal colors. Only three solos are played, giving each soloist space to stretch out in entirely different ways.
The title track is also lengthy and varied, ranging from powerful, full-bodied horn sections to a stripped-down trumpet solo enhanced with delay effects. Arvid Ageborg’s electronically processed trombone solo over deep, rumbling woodwinds in the final piece Leaving the Scene is another highlight. The creative use of electronics in several horn solos makes Resonansium stand out even among other big band albums.
The third album, Vägen (“The Path”), is the complete opposite of carefully composed music for large ensemble. Pianist Klas Nevrin, bassist Pär-Ola Landin, and drummer Peter Danemo had never played together before the day they stepped into the studio in 2009 to improvise freely. That recording, too, ended up in the familiar desk drawer. What we now hear are seven improvisations, ranging from one to thirteen minutes long. Nevrin’s rapid runs and trills are joined by Danemo’s often intense and agile, yet never noisy drumming. When small gaps arise, Landin’s bass often fills them in. A lot happens, but the dynamic range is rich and varied—at times Danemo opts for bells and other small instruments instead of drums or plays only cymbals.
—Rasmus Klockljung – Lira, May 23, 2025