Gyldene Trion - Live at Glenn Miller Café

Philip Clark, The Wire

Gyldene Trion are a Swedish power trio featuring Jonas Kullhammar (tenor saxophone, baritone saxophone), Torbjorn Zetterberg (bass) and Daniel Fredriksson (drums). Their music pitches up somewhere between Sonny Rollins’s trio concepts and an awareness of Albert Ayler’s Spiritual Unity, with the spirit of Thelonious Monk acting as an emotional compass. The rarely covered Monk tune “Stuffy Turkey” opens with a ‘vamp until ready’ bass introduction, which bounces Kullhammar into an athletic leapfrog through Monk’s inscrutable changes. “Friday The 13th” has a similar shape, but Monk’s line is given a nifty re-harmonisation and the performance peaks with a raucous double-time section. Kullhammar’s “Snake City Rundown” fingers the audiences’s ecstatic G-spot, and a pensive take on the wayback standard “The Night Has A Thousand Eyes” eases them in gently.