Swedish vocals
International relevance: **
Bengt-Arne Wallin was noted jazz
musician and composer (he died in 2015) with a special love for
Swedish folk music, and played with everybody from hugely popular
easy listening icon Lill Lindfors to Polish jazz maverick Tomasz
Stańko. His 1971 effort ”Wallin/Wallin” is centered around old
Swedish chorales and psalms with words by poet and lyricist Johan Olov Wallin.
The selected psalms make for a song cycle of sorts that straddles the
lines between prog, fusion, third stream jazz, and progressive big
band. Such an ambitious venture surely demands skill to pull through,
and Wallin indeed managed to drum up a plethora of seasoned and
in-demand players. Names such as the two Jans, Schaffer and Bandel are
– needless to say – featured, as are Okay Temiz, Ola Brunkert,
Stefan Brolund to name but a few. For the vocals, Wallin approached
Ann-Kristin Hedmark and Tommy Körberg, Körberg then a member of
newly formed genre-defying battleship Solar Plexus.
The ambition
level is dazzling, but the ideas and efforts often get in the way of
the music itself. Everyone involved do their best and you can hear
they're pretty thrilled by the whole project, but in the end, the
music gets too unwieldy and sometimes a bit too cerebrally sluggish
to take off. It's interesting as a period piece, but the album's
sheer abundance is too fatiguing for an unadulterated listening
pleasure. Simply put, a little too eager for its own good.
Att bedja (Gud han skälv oss bjöd)
Så går en dag än från vår tid
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