Oskar Schonning / The Calle Stenman Quintet: America, Oh America

America, Oh America is co-led by two of Sweden's most distinctive jazz musicians, trumpeter Calle Stenman and bassist Oskar Schonning. Schönning is the better known of the pair, having been recording since 2004. Stenman debuted in 2019 with the Calle Stenman Quintet's Mr Sands Is In The Dressing Room (AMP), an assured and swinging album which mixed ballads, boppers and hard boppers and was among the under-the-radar pleasures of the year.

America, Oh America is equally delightful, though different in conception and realization. Stenman's quintet—which in 2019 he rather puzzlingly described as "the roughest jazz group in Sweden," when it is in fact a poised and musicianly band—is again present, with no changes in personnel. Jazz, too, is again present. But this time the jazz coexists with Americana, and Stenman's band is augmented by Schönning on a variety of instruments including banjo, mandolin and harmonica, and, on two tracks, by the Swedish Folk Grammy nominee, violinist and vocalist Sara Parkman.

It works beautifully. America, Oh America is not the bucolic stroll through Americana the cover art might suggest. Tunes and chord progressions may or may not resolve themselves in the predictable manner of folk music the world over. Ambiances and textures move between the lovely and the creepy. There is tension and there is not always release. Parts of the album are pastoral and just plain folks, parts of it are edgy and strange. But unlike the curate's egg, all of it is excellent.

The album title is, of course, intended to be bitter sweet. The music was recorded in spring 2020, as campaigning intensified for the US presidential election. It has its twin sights set on the nightmare of four more years of idiocy and misrule, and the open vistas and open minds that is America at its greatest. With the Orange Malevolence, at the time of writing, at most eight weeks away from being fumigated from the White House, the US, and indeed the world, can look forward to better days ahead.

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