"For Listeners Only"
Jan Lundgren, piano/ Mattias Svensson, bass/ Rasmus Kihlberg, drums
Sittel Records
Recorded at Sun Studio, Copenhagen, December 11-13, 2000
I have my own view of jazz based on 65 years of listening and 50 years
of professional involvement. What I hear when I listen to Jan Lundgren
play the piano is a young Swedish musician who came to his musical
style in a perfectly natural way. He does not perform by rote nor
attempt to be a human museum. Rather he takes inspiration from past
greats and interprets this legacy in an informed, honest and personal
way. He creates music for mind and soul and makes me feel good.
I first became aware of Lundgren when Dick Bank sent me a CD he had
produced for Fresh Sound by Conte Candoli entitled Portrait of a Count.
One couldn´t help but immediately notice Lundgren´s talent even in this
fast company. He was also very impressive on his own trio CD, Cooking
at the Jazz Bakery, taped for the same company in mid-September 1996, a
couple of days before the Candoli studio session.
I immediately enlisted Bank´s aid in obtaining Lundgren´s full
dossier for inclusion in the, then, upcoming Biographical Encyclopedia
of Jazz (Oxford University Press). When I worked for Prestige Records
in the early 1950s they issued many of the sides (that´s what we called
78s) recorded by the Metronome label in Sweden. After hearing Arne
Domnérus, Lars Gullin, Gösta Theselius, Bengt Hallberg, Putte Wickman
and Reinhold Svensson, I knew that the Swingin´ Swedes, as they were
dubbed in the U.S., were the hippest, most modern musicians in Europe
in that immediate, post-war period. Lundgren, like them, is world
class.
(Ira Gitler)
- Mr. Gitler began writing professionally about jazz in 1951 when he
was employed by Prestige Record. He later was New York editor of Down
Beat (1964-64; and 1967-70.) He has written for magazines all over the
world (including Estrad) and currently appears in Jazz Times, Down
Beat, Musica Jazz and Swing Journal. He was Leonard Feather´s chief
assistant in the writing of the first Encyclopedia of Jazz (1955). He
has worked as a broadcaster, lecturer, panellist, record and concert
producer and teacher of jazz history. He has been on the faculty of the
Manhattan School of Music from 1992.
