On Oct. 8, closing a triple bill early into the weeklong 2016 Stockholm Jazz Festival, the pianist Bobo Stenson allowed me to understand jazz’s best-known solo piano performer, Keith Jarrett, with a fresh and meaningful perspective. Stenson, perhaps Sweden’s most important jazz export at age 72, flowed through one sterling melody after another, tinged with deeply felt undertones of gospel and R&B and the bittersweet, romantic soul that descends from Bill Evans. It was concert-hall-caliber music played in a nightclub-a terrific and acoustically capable one, called Fasching-and it somehow took Jarrett’s playing out of relief and immersed it into a generation of brilliantly affecting melodists that includes Stenson, Steve Kuhn and others. The set was a reminder to not be satisfied with institutional knowledge and collective wisdom, to look beyond the data you’ve been given.
In fact, the Stockholm festival as a whole delivered this message. The few days I spent there earlier this month were full of discovery, dense with the beginnings of new rabbit holes. And full of self-examination, with questions like: Why don’t I already know about these musicians? What other players and scenes exist in my blind spots? Am I receiving-and, in my position, disseminating-the most worthwhile information? After covering and following a jazz-festival circuit that seems more and more homogenous to me with each passing year, unfamiliar felt very good.
