E.S.T.

Leucocyte

Decca

By Lynell George

Though tempting, it's both dangerous and somewhat specious to assign larger meaning to any artist's final statement. But we do it, and often feel compelled to. Some artists more than others inspire or demand it. There is a mystery about them; their work is abstruse enough to allow room for conjecture; their story has a dramatic arc that has yet to resolve. The Esbjorn Svensson Trio -- e.s.t. -- and their new album Leucocyte, fit all those criteria. For more than a decade, the Swedish jazz ensemble collected shining accolades abroad for their bracingly innovative, elasticized version of jazz -- but had yet to make a dent in the States. That seemed destined to change when the ensemble was on its way to play the JVC Jazz festival in New York. What "might have been," just wasn't in the cards.  Days before the show, the band's leader, pianist-composer, Svensson, died in a scuba diving accident near Stockholm. He was 44 years old.

For American fans who'd come to e.s.t. belatedly, that loss was a mighty blow. Happening onto their work, often by chance, already felt like slipping in late, deep into a second set.  Many came in on the trio's previous -- and 9th--studio recording  Tuesday Wonderland. It's a heady introduction: Plush, fluid, whimsical, a wily collection of instrumentals that pulled "jazz" like taffy into various shapes and sizes, blending all of its colors -- ballads and blues, elegiac ponderings, swirling abstractions, with Svensson's contemplative piano announcing a classical depth and  facility.  It is an album that thankfully takes jazz out of its gilded frame.

While much of this dexterous, genre-bending early work can be revisited on Live In Hamburg (available as a download from EmArcy), Leucocyte is less a collection of soul-ponderings or tight improvisations, but a vast, free-form tone poem (more Ginsberg, say, than Wordsworth). The album is full of electronic muck, impatient squawks and otherworldly squiggles. It's all held-down by tricky, masterful timekeeping via drummer Magnus Öström, and the sure-footedness of Dan Berglund on double bass. It is marshy territory, balanced by Svensson's questing figures that remind us that we are still on some corner of earth just viewing it from another perspective.

The first songs are scene setters. All starts conventionally enough, Svensson, out alone in an epigrammatic prelude, "Decade," a sort of mood-in-miniature he'd perfected. But by track two, the direction shifts dramatically: Bergulnd's bass first, then Svensson, met by an indolent clatter of drums. As a trio they begin to layer ideas. A space fills, tahe plane bends and eventually the electronica back drop feels like something plucked from early ‘70s Emuir Deodato.  Öström's snare pops like a repeating tommy gun, guarding against advance. When it all clears out, what's left is a fading, aural afterimage.

Much of Leucocyte showcases intuitiveness, the trio's fluid back and forth -- between musicians, between concepts, between the earth and universe, spirit and body. Pressed between the thornier passages are respites, switchbacks that open onto startling sonic vistas ("Premonition  II: Contorted").  "Jazz" walks out of space noise, and struts straight-ahead -- something like "jazz man falls to earth," showcasing e.s.t. swinging like the tight trio they are. While "Still" progresses like life underwater, a film stopped-down to its individual frames, each musician playing with restrained, sustained exactitude.

The title cut, "Leucocyte," broken into four movements is a canvass layered with an array of their musical influences: bop, a fuzz funk groove threaded through electronic noise. It's a prog-rock four act, light show -- mewling synth-noise, King Crimson-like motifs, found voices issuing up from a transistor radio. It's big and bold and utterly without category.

Avant jazz? Prog rock? Jam band? None and all of the above, really. It's just that which has made e.s.t. bedeviling in the best possible way. As it turns out the title, "Leucocyte," refers to the biological process, when the white blood cells must renew themselves in order to guard the body against infection. There was something in that process that e.s.t. saw as parallel to their own creative regimen.  They often scheduled spontaneous jam sessions between gigs while they were on tour as a way to renew and rejuvenate. This offering was one of them.

Sometimes categories aren't just superfluous, they just get in the way of what the music wants -- or needs -- to be. Leucocyte is less a final statement or a document projecting where e.st. would have gone. It's simply one moment in e.s.t.'s continued evolution: a band that continued to ask a series of probing, open questions. Which is what music, really, should always do.