Sten Sandell

Sten Sandell and Mattias Stahl may bring to mind the historic piano and vibraphone duo of Sun Ra and Walt Dickerson (although Stahl adds marimba and glockenspiel). But what the two duos have in common is little more than the adoption of jazz idioms and improvising processes. The vocabulary the two Swedish musicians use is distinct.

It has been said that jazz is a voracious musical language, eating all kinds of other music to serve its hybrid nature as a mix of European and African elements in cosmopolitan America, the country where it was born, eventually to be spread to the world. But we have to understand this with some nuances.