The Swedish Mwendo Dawa (the way to a special goal in Swahili) is one of the longest-standing outfits in the Nordic free-improv scene. This group began working in the mid-1970s (and its debut album, Basic Line, was released by Sonet in 1979), and is celebrating its fiftieth anniversary in 2025.  The band features co-leader, pianist and electronics player and composer Susanna Lindeborg, co-leader, tenor sax and EWI player and composer Ove Johansson – who passed away in December 2015 – and drummer David Sundby, with a changing cast of double bass players – among them Anders Jormin and Lars Danielsson, until Jimmi Roger Pedersen joined Mwendo Dawa in the mid-nineties.

Melodic Hope is the 22nd album of Mwendo Dawa and the second album of Mwendo Dawa as a trio, after Johanson’s death, following Silent Voice (LJ, 2018). The album was recorded at Studio Epidemin in Gothenburg in February 2024 and offers ten pieces, four credited to Lindeborg and the rest to the trio, but most of the time the music was free improvised. It suggests that the Mwendo Dawa Trio has found its own free and exploratory language that still flows organically.

Mwendo Dawa trio is still experimenting with elements of contemporary music, jazz and free free jazz, fusion and free improvisation, and electronics, and on Melodic Hope it focuses on more spacious, free-associative, and rhythmic dynamics, but idiosyncratic, risk-taking, and uncompromising as ever. The profound affinity of its musicians, their deep listening, emphatic interplay, and generous sense of humor and irony, often gravitates into beautiful, emotional pieces like the title piece.

Eyal Hareuveni 

Susanna Lindeborg (piano, electronics), Jimmi Roger Pedersen (bass), David Sundby (drums)