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.
Letter From Stockholm
Editor Evan Haga on the Swedish capital's annual jazz festival