New release May 31: "Hultén / Forkelid - Avant-garde Mélodique"

New release May 31: "Hultén/Forkelid - Avant-garde Mélodique, Live at the Royal Swedish Academy of Fine Arts"

I'm very happy to share with you a live album, featuring a very dear and long-time musical friend of mine, saxophonist Örjan Hultén! We have been playing in different settings over the years, among others Örjan's band Orion, which I was a part of the first few years and albums. But we actually started out playing with each other just saxophone and piano, trying out some songs, mostly Örjan's. Soon the band Orion was formed and the original duet never made any public performances. Then, all of the sudden, in January 2020 we got an opportunity to play a concert at the Royal Swedish Academy of Fine Arts, through the great people of PianoVisions, who usually arrange classical piano concerts in this space, but wanted to try to do jazz for a change. We put together a set list composed of our own original tunes, some old and some new. We had a really great evening, and it was also recorded by our PianoVision friends Leonardo Wehlander and Johan Sandback.

Then the pandemic struck and the recording fell into oblivion, for a while. But earlier this year Leo and Johan approached us again with this recording and wondered if we shouldn't release it, since both the music and the sound was very enjoyable.

So here we are, a document of one night's music and many years of musical friendship. I hope you will enjoy it!

The beautiful cover art is a drawing by Jenny Svenberg Bunnel, who was in the audience that night. Thank you so much!

And the title actually also comes from a comment from another listener who wanted to find words for describing the music we were playing.