Titles are often clues to an artist’s intentions, but Words Were Coming Out Our Ears may be more of a motivation. The album’s name evokes an overloaded state, and who in 2025 doesn’t know the feeling of wanting to shrink from too much input? But the LP imparts a very different experience, one of perpetually monitored just-rightness.
The instrumental lineup of piano, drums and two double basses is sufficiently unconventional to require care, lest sounds collide or congeal. Swedish musicians Johan Graden, Nils Agnas, Pär Ola Landin and Vilhelm Bromander—all of whom play jazz but also work in song-based musical styles—proceed with plenty of mindfulness, making choices that contribute to a cohesive group sound.
The music’s generative methodology flirts with the potential for extreme outcomes. Seven of the nine tracks here are collective improvisations, and while freedom makes anything possible, free improvisations often have a way of either projecting intensity while accumulating density or inhabiting the far end of the spectrum. But not on Words Were Coming Out Our Ears. The tracks are relatively brief, from a-little-more-than-two to not-quite-six minutes. Each contains enough event and contrast to keep your interest throughout, but things are never either overwhelming or empty.
Turning once more to titles for signals of intent: Three of the album’s tracks are titled “Stanza,” and another is called “Suggesting Française.” The quartet’s aesthetic connects spontaneity to an elective use of language. A cursory listen to Words Were Coming Out Our Ears might give the impression that the quartet is finding its way toward areas that Bill Evans and Paul Bley explored in the middle of the last century. But while those might be influences, there are other sources.
“Go Leave,” the one piece that Graden, Agnas, Landin and Bromander cover, was written by Canadian folk group the McGarrigle Sisters, and the commitment to spontaneous generation brings with it perspectives on instrumental and individual hierarchy that are more determinedly egalitarian than jazz usually allows. The result is music that’s simultaneously lyrical and abstract, with new notions to be heard with each listen. [Aspen Edities]
—Bill Meyer
