The Electrics - Live at Glenn Miller Café

Brian Morton, The Wire

And of course they play acoustically, with a rare and wonderful instinct for ways to combine (as trumpeter Axel Dörner puts it) "pitch oriented music and rhythms of traditional jazz with music where the focus is mainly on the sound itself". By "traditional", he clearly means bop and post-bop rather than classic jazz, but the point is well taken. With Sture Ericson on reeds, Ingebrigt Håker Flaten on bass and Raymond Strid on drums, it's a line-up well suited to explore those debatable lands. Five titles, of which only the very brief, noise-driven "Electrance" is shorter than ten minutes and the long opening "Electrips" twice that. Dörner's brass sounds are riper and more linear here than usual, in keeping with that brief mission statement, and it's Strid and Flaten who break things up. The Stockholm venue is an eclectic's playground, but this has to be one of the more adventurous bookings of recent years.