Bass-player Dan Berglund thought the Esbjörn Svensson Trio would last forever, but after Svensson’s death everything changed. Now Berglund’s back, with a new band, Tonbruket
OVER THE YEARS, Dan Berglund became accustomed to full houses and rapturous applause for his band. He was the bass player in the Esbjörn Svensson Trio (EST) for 15 years alongside pianist and band-leader Esbjörn Svensson and drummer Magnus Öström. They had, he admits, a fantastic life with sold-out shows in big halls, international tours and widespread acclaim.
All that changed in June 2008 when Svensson died in a scuba diving accident in Stockholm’s archipelago. The death of the 44-year-old musician, composer and leading European jazz visionary robbed the musical world of a magnificent talent, but it had much deeper repercussions for Berglund.
“We were the best of friends, we were brothers, EST was like a family,” says Berglund quietly. “In fact, we probably saw each other more than we saw our own families. Of course, we had lengthy talks and disagreements but it was amazing how well it worked for all those years. Fifteen years is a long time to play music with the same people.”
Aside from mourning his friend and bandmate, Berglund also had to think about what came next. "When Esbjörn died, we had just finished recording and mixing Leucocyteand that was released a few months later. We had great plans for the trio and had lots of gigs booked but we had to move on."
A few years earlier, EST’s label ACT had talked to him about a solo album. “At the time I got that contract, I thought I could do an album by myself and bring in different players. But when Esbjörn died, everything changed. I thought for a long time about what I wanted to do and what I could do.
“Then I met up again with Johan (Lindström, guitarist) who I’d played with before in a band called Per Texas Johansson and we decided to do something together. I tried to write some music and Johan started to write a lot of tunes and the time seemed right to record and tour.”
Tonbruket the band (and the album) is Bergland’s first post-EST move. Featuring Bergland, Lindström, pianist Martin Hederos (from indie band The Soundtrack of Our Lives) and drummer Andreas Weliin (from experimental folk/jazz duo Wildbirds Peacedrums), the album is compelling and diverse. There are beautiful melodies and grooves which will remind you of EST’s back-catalogue but there are also distinctive forays into out-there sounds. It’s an album which could only have been made by players well versed in, and alive to, the possibilities of mixing styles.
Berglund never had any intention of becoming a jazz player. Growing up in the small northern village of Pilgrimstad, Berglund wanted to be in rock 'n'roll bands. "I didn't want to play jazz initially at all," he chuckles. "My music teacher tried to get me interested but I wanted to play prog-rock like Rush and the other bands I was listening to. Then I heard Weather Report's Heavy Weatheralbum and I was blown away by it. Suddenly, I was into jazz in a big way."
His music teacher recommended him for a job with the local state-run orchestra. “I really wanted to get that job so I started to practise a lot and play jazz on my double-bass and listen to more of the music. I got into Charlie Parker, Miles Davis and John Coltrane and was hooked. And, best of all, I got the job and was paid by the government to be in this band.”
Eventually he tired of life in a small town and moved to Stockholm in 1990. Aside from studying in the Royal Music University, Berglund played in loads of bands. While he was touring with Lina Nyberg, he met Esbjörn Svensson for the first time.
“This was before he got EST together so we knew each other a few years before he asked me to join the trio. He actually asked me to join it in a sauna while we were on tour with Nyberg. They had another bass player before me and I remember going to see the band back then and thinking that was the kind of music I wanted to play. I felt so lucky when Esbjörn asked me to join them.
“I was in another band around the time I joined the trio but I chose the trio because I felt it was more my kind of music and I thought we had the potential to go further than my other bands. Of course, achieving this involved a lot of work and we spent a lot of time trying to break through.
“Our aim was to get into places and to play places where they didn’t normally have jazz music. It was hard work, but it was fun.”
In 2004, in an interview with this writer, Svensson attributed much of EST’s success to promotion. “If you want people to hear your music, you have to promote it,” Svensson emphasised. “You have to find a way of doing this so it suits the music. I know that it is possible to promote jazz and improvised music in a much better way that it is done at the moment.”
Berglund believes this was a huge contributory factor to the trio’s success. “We had lucky breaks, sure, but we also had a very good team and benefited from good planning. I think we were the first Swedish jazz group to have a booking agent and Burkard (Hopper) was a great manager and we had a good label in ACT.”
As his thoughts turn to the future, Berglund is fully aware that the years spent playing with EST will define him for quite some time. “I don’t have any problems with that,” he says. “I’m very happy to still talk about EST and what we did. It defines me and I’m very proud to have been a part of that trio.”
He hopes a lot of what he learned with EST will rub off on the new project. “This band is what I want to do for many years to come. I enjoyed the longevity we had with EST and the fact that we had the same personnel the whole time.
“It’s funny, though, we’ve only done four gigs so far as Tonbruket and already we’ve had two drummers and two piano players. In the future, I hope we can keep the four core members the same.
“With EST, that was just natural. There was no chance in the world that you could replace one of us for a tour or that we could have replaced Esbjörn and I hope it’s going to be the same with this group in the future. When you have the same core group for a long time, you create some amazing music because of the chemistry. That’s how all the great rock and pop bands work.
“You can hear it’s a real band because they can spark off each other, it’s not just musicians coming in now and then.”
Dan Berglund’s Tonbruket play Dublin’s Button Factory on Saturday
