Last year, the Swedish AALY Trio of sax player Mats Gustafsson, double bass player Peter Jansson, and drummer-percussionist Kjell Nordeson reconvened after more than two decades’ hiatus, and released a new album (Sustain, Silkheart, 2024). Certain Magical Moves offers a similar reunion. Nordeson (who was the original drummer of the groups Nacka Forum and Angles) and fellow Swedish soprano sax player Johan Petri, who is also a producer, sound engineer, theater director, and the head of Alice Musik Produktion, recorded in 1994 a series of duos for the album I Fear This War (Alice Musik Produktion, 1994), interspersed with songs and texts by American poet Lorine Niedecker and colored by the nearness in time to the first Iraq war.
Thirty years later, Petri and Nordeson, who now reside in San Francisco, met at Studio Pipersgatan in Stockholm in May 2024. This time, with the sole intention of co-existing in music for a moment. The duo recorded four free improvised pieces, one of them, «The War Again», sounds like a moving and humble spiritual ritual to exorcise the evil human demons that propel the horrific wars in Ukraine and Gaza.
Certain Magical Moves sounds as if Petri and Nordeson never stopped playing together. They simply stepped down into the same river again; necessarily different, obviously, more experienced, but necessarily connected. Petri articulated instant, engaging, and soulful lyrical melodies, and Nordeson resonated and colored them with resourceful and inventive percussive moves. The exploratory music flowed naturally in a purely horizontal process, employing an elastic sensibility of time and free pulses, and searching for new timbres and expressions.
The album is structured like a four-movement suite, opening with the powerful «Let the Moon Be»; gravitating into the mournful and introspective «The War Again»; then on the title piece alternating between deepening the emotional, lyrical vein and gaining rhythmic power and volition; before going full-circle with the powerful, groove-based and life-affirming «Through all Time», which ends with another touching prayer. Clearly, Petri and Nordeson must visit the recording studio more often.
Eyal Hareuveni
Johan Petri (soprano saxophone), Kjell Nordeson (percussion)
