Peter Janson, Jonas Kullhammar & Paal Nilssen-Love - Live at Glenn Miller Café

Johan Lif, Västmanlands Länd Tidning

"Resistance has always been - and will always be - a necessity for this kind of freely improvised jazz".
This writes Mats Gustafsson I the short liner notes to this CD with young, Scandinavian free jazz, recorded in concert in Stockholm last year.
Resistance against what? Some resistance in general against cultural conformism?
May be so. Mats Gustafsson seams to mean that just the simple existents of this kind music is an act of resistance in a "world like this with its mass hypnotized, mass commercialised, post September 9 MESS" as he writes. Or; a free and independent way of listen leads to a free way of thinking and a free way of acting.
Is it like that? In a streamlined every-day the non-commercialised culture creates an autonomy zone were it gives space for new thinking and questioning. That is the ideal. But does the culture questions it selves? Does it open the door for others than the already found the salvation? And can music in itself really be an act of social criticism?
This attitude awakes both expectations and suspicions - expectations about the possibilities of the art to change, suspicions that the attitude is too much looked into its world. But listen too the record. This is music, which at least from musically point of view, extends itself outside the bubble of culture.
Critics have lifted the saxophonist Jonas Kullhammar to the sky during the last years. This is easy to understand; he is young, unbelievable talent, with an energy and joyful playing which the Swedish jazz life isn't spoiled with. His style has up to know been traditional, rooted in the 1950s and the early 1960's of jazz music.
Here Jonas Kullhammar shows that he wants more than that. It's his first record with free playing, and it is without any doubts a big success. Sure, one can hear echoes from "the big names" - Coltrane, Ayler - but Kullhammar has a style of his own, fearless and self-assured, messy and rowdy but also joyful and triumphant. It is music, which seethes from newly found freedom.
It is also a record, which rooted in the tradition. One who only sees the history of music as a series of mechanical breaks of roles, an independent development of its own blocked from the society, which has created the music, may think that the music is too comfortable. But those who mean that the language, which was created by Coltrane in the 60s, still is relevant - both as music and as criticism - find a lot of pleasure in this record.
After all these years is an unchained, atonal saxophone still a musical shock - and a musical stickler for the truth.