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

Phillip McNally, Cadence Magazine

This is a live trio date from Stockholm that includes some very serious heavy hitters in the rhythm section: you've heard Peter Janson with Mats Gustafsson in the Aaly Trio, in a recording from this same club in´99; Nilssen-Love is an important presence in Ken Vandermark's Schooldays Project.

And this is certainly a recording of trio music where all three musicians share the center of attention, deservedly.
But the new voice for me is a young tenor player, Jonas Kullhammar. He certainly comes out of Albert Ayler via Peter Brötzmann, but to describe young Kullhammar that way is to do him a disservice. He has a great range of effects at his disposal, and while he has a beautiful stringent tone like Brötzmann, he also is gifted with melodic instinct, a sense of structure, and a masterful ability to comp behind the other members of the trio. In other words, this is a lot more than a blowing date. Kullhammar knows how to play softly, to create backrooms to make room for Janson and Nilssen-Love to stretch without just laying out.

He is always contributing to the total sound. He has a great sense of dynamics, and even in their most ferocious blowing, this group never falls for the clichéd crescendo-decrescendo game that's become so much of a pattern for Free Jazz.
It is records like this that make you remember what a fine thing free music be in capable hands. And for the tenor aficionados out there, Kullhammar is someone you need to check out.