Swedish, Stockholm-based young jazz guitarist and composer Kasper Agnas wanted to expand his compositional skills within a more notated music, which is newer territory, where he can avoid the sudden inchoerence of spontaneous improvisation, or the need to reconcile the musicians’ strong individual voices. Agnas wanted to remove the improvisational element altogether so he could highlight the core of the composition.

Agnas composed around thirty compositions between 2019 and 2013, and six of these compositions are featured on Stockholm 2019-2023. The album was recorded at Atlantis studios in Stockholm in June 2025.

Agnas is accompanied by many members of his musical family – the real family (guitarist Sabina, pianist Max, trumpeter Urban and Joakim, vocalist Stina, and drummer Nils), and close associates (Mandus Almqvist, pianist Johan Garden, violinists Alva Press and Josefin Runsteen, and cellist Linnea Talp).

Kaper Agnas is a resourceful composer who likes to explore different sonic possibilities and compositional strategies.  He composed complex and formalized, chamber pieces for trumpets and trumpets and guitars («Parus Major» and «Springs»); suggest minimalist, sparse, and resonant textures for acoustic guitars and their suggestive overtones («Nostalgi I-IX»); offer a disorienting, dense layers and collisions of string instruments («Agogics I»); and mysterious and dramtic, wave-like, piano and strings-based sustained pulse («Waves, surge, float»). The last composition, «Agogics II», attempts to link the immediacy of jazz rhythm with strict compositional form and may suggest how Agnas may expand and elaborate his compositional skills.

Eyal Hareuveni

Kasper Agnas (guitar), Mandus Almqvist (guitar), Sabina Agnas (guitar), Johan Graden (piano), Max Agnas (piano), Alva Press (violin), Josefin Runsteen (violin), Urban Agnas (trumpet), Joakim Agnas (trumpet), Linnea Talp (cello), Stina Agnas (vocals), Nils Agnas (drums)