ESBJORN SVENSSON:IN COMMON with Sonny Rollins, Keith Jarrett, Herbie Hancock, Pat Metheny, the late Miles Davis and only a handful of others in recent times, the Swedish pianist/composer Esbjorn Svensson was that rarest of musical breeds - the jazz artist who could reach a wider audience.
The 44-year-old Svensson, who could not be resuscitated after injuries sustained while scuba-diving at Vrmd, in the Stockholm archipelago, is a huge loss both to the arts of jazz-making, and jazz diplomacy.
From Swedish small-town obscurity in the mid-1990s, the Esbjorn Svensson Trio (known universally as EST) became a box-office smash everywhere - even in the US, that most resistant of marketplaces for jazz imports.
Svensson was regularly told by new fans that they did not know they could enjoy jazz until they heard his - but if he had an appeal for Radiohead listeners, he kept the hardline jazz audience with him as well. He and his EST partners for 15 years, bassist Dan Berglund and drummer Magnus Ostrom, achieved this through their infectious three-way empathy, and Svensson's knack for composing hauntingly memorable themes.
As with the guitarist Metheny, EST tunes always sound like wordless songs. "The only questions I ask myself while composing," Svensson told me in 2002, "are - do we have enough here for a story? Is there a nice journey going on here, are we avoiding repeating ourselves?' - That's what I ask myself. Not - what kind of music is this?"
Svensson's eclecticism was not calculating, however, rather it was the enthusiasm of a piano obsessive who had started out in a rock duo with his childhood drummer friend Ostrom, and ended up a Glenn Gould fan. He was unabashed about borrowing the light shows, smoke effects and electronics of the rock and pop worlds and was a master of the grandiloquent set-piece climax.
Yet a good two-thirds of any EST gig would always mingle a classical chamber group's acoustic delicacy with full-on jazz improv that could win over an audience more used to the work of Jarrett, Brad Mehldau, or even Thelonious Monk. It was a fizzing Monk-oriented set (with a little Ornette Coleman woven in) that Svensson played when he first came to London in February 1999.
Soon replacing covers with all-original material, the band went on to win several Swedish Grammies, acclaim from the BBC (best international act at the British Jazz Awards, 2003), MIDEM (revelation of the festival, also 2003), and awards from France's Jazzman magazine, among many other accolades. Through it all, the modest and totally music-focused Svensson trio behaved in interviews like the slightly bashful long-time mates they were. Sometimes they seemed to be half-expecting to discover it had all been a mistake.
Svensson was born at Skultuna, a tiny village near Vasteras, 60 miles west of Stockholm. His father was a jazz fan, his mother an amateur classical pianist who taught him the chords to Long Tall Sally and Blue Suede Shoes. The young Svensson liked Deep Purple, Jimi Hendrix and Frank Zappa before he discovered Monk, Chick Corea or Jarrett via his father's record collection; his cousin played drums in a local group knocking out 1950s rock'n'roll hits. Svensson's schoolfriend Ostrom was a willing participant in the same idea and the duo's first drum kit was built from old paint cans discarded by Ostrom's father.
Svensson later attended Stockholm's conservatoire, the Kungliga Musikhogskolan, and though the pianist concentrated on pop and studio work when he graduated, he also played bebop from 1985 to 1988 with drummer Fredrik Noren.
But he never lost touch with Ostrom, and by 1993 the two had also discovered bass guitarist Berglund and begun to work on a jazz repertoire that drew on both the classic approach of the acoustic jazz piano trio (particularly Jarrett's) and the hooks, dramatic build-ups, rhythmic drive and clear thematic statements of rock and pop.
The group played every Swedish festival it could find in those early years, and also worked with singers including Viktoria Tolstoy and Louise Hoffsten. With the Trio Plays Monk album in 1996, Svensson reinvented the great composer's familiar themes with startling relish, often powered by Ostrom's bold use of funk and marching-band rhythms. The ensemble's conversational style was honed by the time of the next two releases, Winter in Venice, and From Gagarin's Point of View, in 1997 and 1998, by which time the band was recording for Germany's ACT label.
A sensational appearance at the 1999 Montreux Jazz Festival was followed by the sale of several thousand copies of the album Good Morning Susie Soho, and EST became a first-choice festival booking not only in Europe, but the Far East and finally the US.
Svensson, a modest and courteous man, was often asked how long the same line-up (a rarity in the itinerant and economically unstable jazz world) could hold together and continue to produce fresh work. He would answer that he knew an EST track once he had written it, but could not think of what the formula might be beforehand. "We have to develop without knowing how," he said.
His wife Eva and sons Ruben and Noah survive him.
Esbjorn Svensson: born April 16th, 1964; died June 14th, 2008