Swedish Modern Jazz - Arne Domnerus

Round About Midnight

Swedish Modern Jazz
Arne Domnerus and His Group
Recorded in Sweden
RCA Camden CAL-417
1958

From the back cover: One of the wonders of the postwar jazz world has been the sudden rise to dominance in European jazz of Sweden, a country which could scarcely have been found on the jazz map before 1946. The first suggestion that Americans had of Sweden's jazz potential occurred in the late Forties when the Swedish clarinetist Stan Hasselgard came to this country. Here, it seemed, was the first clarinetist who could challenge Benny Goodman's long rule as top man on that instrument. So good was Hasselgard, in fact, that Goodman found himself in the unique position of being the only other clarinetist that Goodman has ever featured

Hasselgard's career was nipped in the bud when he died in a tragic auto accident, but even in the few brief months that Americans heard him, his presence served to turn attention to Sweden as a jazz source. And there proved to be jazz aplenty there.

Not just jazz in general, either, but a rather special kind of jazz that the Swedes have since made uniquely their own. It is based on the Swing Era of jazz, the first jazz period of which the Swedes were strongly aware. (This has let to two striking characteristics of jazz in Sweden: there are no Dixieland or Traditionalists bands to speak of and there are an amazing number of clarinetists who play like Benny Goodman.) From Swing, the Swedes moved readily to Bop and the later refinements of Bop. No other country is quite so oriented toward modern jazz as is Sweden.

But it is apparently not in the Swedish nature to abandon anything that is good simply because something new and attractive has come along. So they have clung to swing even while the embraced bop and, in consequence, most Swedish jazz has a swingingly modern quality that is found only occasionally elsewhere.

When the jazz world's attention was directed toward Sweden by Hasselgard's talent, one of the first major figures it encountered was Arne Domnerus who has maintained his position throughout the Fifties as one of the top three jazzmen in a country brimming with able jazz musicians. Domnerus began playing alto saxophone when he was a teenager (he was born in Stockholm in 1924) and one of his earliest experiences was in a young amateur band which included Rolf Ericson, a trumpeter, who has played with Woody Herman and Charlie Barnet; Simon Brehm, who became a pioneer Swedish bass star; and pianist Gosta Theselius (who arranged the two full band selections in this collection). By the time he was seventeen, Domnerus was leading a band in a restaurant in a small town in Laland, possibly the most frigid apprenticeship that any potential jazz star has undergone.

For the next ten years he was heard in various Swedish bands playing both alto and clarinet. When he formed his own band in 1951, one of his sidemen was old colleague Ericson; another was baritone saxophonist Lars Gullin who has since become, with Domnerus and pianist Bengt Hallberg, one of the most widely hailed Swedish jazzmen. Despite a rising tide of able young Swedish jazz musicians, Domnerus has held his place as the country's finest alto saxophonist, attested by the fact that for seven successive years he has been the winer on that instrument in the annual poll for the Swedish All Stars.

In these selections, Donmnerus is heard on alto saxophone in all but three instances (Relax, Lady Be Good and Creole Love Call on which he plays the clarinet). In his early days, when the alto was his only instrument, his style was patterned on the smooth, sweeping flow of Benny Carter. Later he fell strongly under the influence of Charlie Parker but now, as these performances show (the first side was made in 1957, the second in 1956), he has evolved an extremely effective fusion of Parker and Carter which is thoroughly in the vein of the general swing-cum-modern feeling of Swedish jazz as a whole.

On clarinet he gives evidence of some fascination with Jimmy Giuffre's deliberate walking style in the lower register on Relax but he can also move into the upper register with authority as he does in the latter stages of this number and in Lady Be Good. On this last number, in fact, he build his solo from a casual, subdued entrance to a wailing intensity that marks him as one of the major talents on what is a relatively neglected instrument in jazz today.

Aside from his instrumental versatility, Domnerus is shown in three lights here. Side One features his Quartet (Domnerus; Gunnar Svensson, piano; Georg Riedel, bass; Egil Johansen, drums) in the free and easy improvisatory atmosphere of original compositions or of tunes which are well established favorites as take-off points for jazz excursions. The quartet selections on Side Two are mostly ballads, given a sensitive balladic treatment. The last two numbers on this side, Take The "A" Train and Creole Love Call, are both by Domnerus' orchestra, a compact organization created by the addition of only three men to the Domnerus Quartet: Bengt-Arne Wallin, trumpet, and Rolf Blomqvist and Lennart Jansson, saxophones.

On the two orchestra performances, the work of Wallin, one of the younger, upcoming Swedish jazz stars, is of special interest, particularly on Creole Love Call in which he shows that he has a strong personality of his own, that he is no more a slavish imitator of Williams than the arrangements of these two tunes from Duke Ellington's repertory are slavish imitations of the Ellington handling of them.

The emphasis that Domnerus puts on Ellington in his full band selections (accented by his inclusion of a third Ellington tune, Don't You Know I Care, by the Quartet) indicates another of the influences that has gone into the production of the warm, swinging, alertly provocative playing of this unusually fully developed jazz star, a star whose brilliance now shines beyond his native Sweden to light up the jazz corners of the world.

From Billboard - April 28, 1958: Domnerus displays his talented way with alto sax, augmenting the quartet of Side 1 to a provocative septet on Side 2. "Frenesi," "Blue Moon" and "Gone With The Wind" stand out, with $1.98 tag a lure. Recorded in Sweden, sound is excellent.

Topsy Theme
Relax
Frenesi
For Dave
Lady Be Good
Round About Midnight
Blue Moon
I Got Rhythm
Didn't You Know I Care
Gone With The Wind
Take The "A" Train
Creole Love Call