Sven-Åke Johansson: Two recent recordings

By Stuart Broomer

When Sven-Åke Johansson died at 81, on June 15^th of this year, he had been an active explorer in multiple art forms for roughly sixty years, including work at the frontiers of music’s possibilities, collaborating across the rich spectrum of improvised music, and working in visual arts and theatre as well. Two recent releases, one recorded in 2022, the other in 2025, place him with similarly radical musicians, all several decades younger, all as original as Johansson himself, their work further enlivened by his inspiring presence. Most remarkably, the musics, though both improvised, are radically different, one wandering loosely, the other immediate and tightly focussed, but both essentially mysterious, elusive. There are virtually no overlaps in instrumentation except Johansson’s drums, while his accordion, brought to bear in the Café OTO performance, might oddly parallel the robot piano that Nicholas Bussmann plays on Tea-Time. It is the genius of these musics to elaborate utterly distinct social and communicative models, a tribute to the openness and engagement of all of the contributors. 

Nicholas Bussmann, Sven-Åke Johansson, Yan Jun – Tea-Time (Ni-Vu-Ni-Connu, 2024) *****

This recording from 2022 finds Johansson working with Nicholas Bussmann, a composer and cellist who might be said to work at the edge of everything, including computers, free improvisation and Chinese choral music. Among his projects is the duo of Kapital Band 1 with drummer Martin Brandlmayr in which Bussman “plays” robot piano, the programmable instrument he also plays here. The third member of the trio, Yan Jun, is a Beijing-based singer, musician and poet who has worked with Bussmann on remarkably speculative works like The News Trilogy / Revolution Songs in an AI Environment, easier to listen to than describe.

Yan Jun’s broad range of vocal techniques will link him to both traditional and post-modern musics. Here it can be a strange warbling that suggests Tibetan throat singing and other incantatory practices. Together the three create one of the decade’s most mysterious recordings, a unique sonic work that is also especially engaging, suspended across continents, tethered to its own benign universe.

On the recording’s Bandcamp page, commentator Kristoffer Cornils emphasizes the quality of a dream, pointing out Bussman’s suggestion that “the joint improvisations that you hear on Tea-Time capture a sound that once came to [him] in a dream and that he made a reality with the help of his fellow musicians.” He also cites Bussman describing the work’s “double fakeness of fake jazz meeting fake throat singing”. The work is perfectly comfortable in its strangeness and its assemblage. Bussmann creates at times a kind of fragmentary ragtime, something genuinely random; Yan Jun’s performance ranges from something like moaning and wandering in pitch to gravelly approximations of traditional throat-singing. Always at the ready, Johansson provides shifting rhythmic patterns, precise, dynamic, and, like the other elements, somehow detached, whether from its surroundings or, delightfully, everything else.

There is no self-consciousness here, no more sense of forced creativity than of forced convention. This is genuine playing, that is, play, that sense of difference here displacing any commonplace pattern recognition or sense of interaction; this playful construction and exploration lead somewhere beyond comprehension, its dream logic a positive route to genuine creative growth. Vision is vision and, here and elsewhere, Bussmann’s revolt against the conventions of improvised music may be as effective in his practice as Randy Weston’s transformative experience at a Gnawa healing ceremony, Ornette Coleman’s harmolodics or Anthony Braxton’s overlapping of contradictory formal practices. Its insistences, its occasional rushing a beat, its genuinely polyrhythmic and poly-spatial play, all eventually gather: beyond its essential challenge to almost any sense of convention, the music will lead to spaces that are radically original; further, they are also original in that they belong, in some sense, to a listener’s willing, even willful, acts of acceptance and assemblage.

By the end of Tea-Time (the title suggests, as does the work, repose, serenity, yes, but also the antique, the formal, a hierarchy of staged conventions), the three musicians have developed a highly distinctive zone, a kind of pure music that is liberated from intentionality, a collective improvisation that also suggests a collected music.

Sven-Åke Johansson, Pierre Borel, Seymour Wright, Joel Grip - Two Days at Café OTO (OTOROKU, 2025) *****

Two Days at Café OTO documents an extraordinary quartet with the alto saxophonists Pierre Borel and Seymour Wright and bassist Joel Grip. Each night begins with a trio and ends with the full quartet. The first night’s trio has Wright; the second night has Borel. The first night also has a brief centerpiece, a five-minute quartet with Johansson on accordion, Borel taking his place at the drum kit, with Wright and Grip playing their usual instruments. 

The music possesses a unique sense of the dynamic, with an internal delicacy that one might not expect from a band that’s half of [Ahmed] (Wright and Grip) or half of the bar-drug-dream sequence band (Borel and Grip) of the film The Brutalist. The trio with Wright has a startling delicacy, with the intensity and reiterative phrases distinctive in his work, but somehow softened, resulting in a fresh lyricism. The first extended quartet piece emphasizes both the principle of dialogue practiced by the two saxophonists and their distinctive sounds and lines. Like all the music here, it breathes life, a kind of ideal meeting of four distinguished musicians willing to engage with a minimum of preconceptions and a commitment to spontaneity.

The second LP begins with the set’s longest track, a trio performance by Borel, Grip and Johansson that begins with a kind of Morse Code interplay between alto saxophone and bass. Whether in quartet or trio formation, the musicians are tightly focused, subliminal and shifting structures almost always in view, developing continuously throughout. Moments arise here in which Wright appears to be present, but which ultimately reveal themselves to be Grip’s virtuoso bowing. Borel moves on and off Mic suggesting duet play as well, something else he creates by alternating short melodic phrases with sustained multiphonics. There’s a natural conclusion, a pause, Johansson launches another movement. Grip will pause after a solo interlude. Johansson eventually launches a tom-tom pattern. Grip enters again. Borel will sustain a continuous high harmonic throughout an extended bass passage. A hard-edged and extended bass solo eventually entices Johansson’s accordion to the fore, which inspires Borel to some strange hard-edged funk (there’s a Mingus theme underpinning some of this). Each of these extended forays will eventually become revelatory, sometimes pitched between mayhem and sentiment – unlikely poles that become points of exchange. Multiple whistles arise. 

The final quartet begins in radically different sonic territory, with the two alto saxophonists exploring isolated upper registers in a strangely abstracted, reed ensemble including Johansson, who for a time plays accordion again. When he turns to drums, the prior pointillist dialogue between Borel and Wright continues, short melodic fragments, isolated honks and smears ricocheting between the two in an intertwining duet in which they can fall into honking in unison, shifting the notion of collective improvisation toward simultaneous composition. Uncanny elements arise, like a sustained, ascending high tone that may be hard to assign to either wind; as it develops, it eventually reveals Grip’s arco bass, pitches eventually close enough to merge with one of the altos in one of the year’s most brilliant recordings of collectively improvised music. The piece continues with Borel’s own swirling, ascending phrases poised against Wright’s honks, Grip’s harmonics and Johansson’s almost military snare, a passage of conjoined alto cries and cymbals sufficient to suggest one of Albert Ayler’s more sacred conclusions, just before Johansson turns again to the accordion and Grip contributes a repeated ascending figure to the end.