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

Magnus Eriksson, Svenska Dagbladet

Jonas Kullhammar is the most talked-about younger, Swedish saxophonist in recent time. Technically he is exceptionally driven, and he is musically versatile with fine control of form.
On a newly released concert recording from Glenn Miller Café in Stockholm he demonstrates that he also controls the beautiful art of dissolving the form.
Obviously he has, for a long time been waiting to give it a try and his contributions together with the drummer Paal Nilssen-Love and the bassist Peter Janson (both also play in some of Mats Gustafsson's groups) is completely convincing. In the opening title "Cold Thrills", Kullhammar varies some choppy melody fragments, while Nilssen-Love rumbles on the drums. Kullhammar kind of punctures his phrases with an unexpected end note, just to move it ahead in tangled expressivities.
But the group can also restrain. In "Slowdown" Peter Janson opens with a long melody solo with a slight oriental touch which also could have fit in a modern mainstream frame. Kullhammar answers with searching phrases, but his playing is restrained, as he tests the convincing force. The tone becomes reinforced, but the piece ends up in a meditative monotony, were some Coltrane phrases give a nice round of.
The music is rich of contrasts, and the inner tensions create whole the time new, challenging and suggestive figurations.