Sven Åke-Johansson: Two Days at Cafe OTO

Sven Åke-Johansson's death in 2025 felt distinctly like a chapter closed. There is a cliche in Jazz to characterize players of a certain class and longstanding influence as "youthful" or otherwise endlessly inventive despite multi-decade, multidisciplinary careers. Its excessive use is justified by elements of the medium's own construction and history. Jazz itself appears to be an eternally youthful tradition, a set of lofty and difficult characteristics which coalesce into an incorruptible, universal playground. What results is an often tumultuous and complex, yet nevertheless a profoundly rewarding organization of play, always evolving despite the trivial matter of age. It is how the genre has survived for almost 150 years, even with forty years (a conservative estimation) of declining patronage. Under these guidelines, Johansson was almost certainly the youngest performer still playing and the most committed to this philosophy of play and experimentation. Whatever his age, there is no denying that his death is a tremendous loss to the very fabric of his genre.

Two Days at Cafe Oto is invaluable as a posthumous peek into the drummer's mischievous genius, and never disappoints. He is joined by saxophonist Seymour Wright and bassist Joel Grip, both members of the trailblazing group Ahmed, and Pierre Borel, one of Europe's most idiosyncratic reedmen. The ensemble is a hard one to imagine as a single unit; all from rather diverse backgrounds, with Borel making a name for himself as an accomplished soloist. Johansson appears to delight in these inherent contradictions. He plays the instigating prankster with the oversized bag of tricks. Easy pathways are decisively rejected, dragging the band through equally profound and hilarious sonic waters.

"Day One" begins sans Borel, and thus the flavor of Grip and Wright's Ahmed work comes through strong. Grip is especially thorny, baritone and boisterous, while Wright's alto lays down a heavy bed of sound. Johansson acts accordingly and disrupts their stint with an off- kilter march syncopated under long, loud rolls. Wright appears to fully take in his elder's designs, and begins a campaign of truly wild squawks and pops. A sort of cat-and-mouse develops between the two. Wright occupies the subtle silences between Johansson and Grip, and like a snake in a thin crevice, glides his way into various shapes and styles among the drum's heady atmospheres. All are admirably light on their feet, yet what strikes the ear most is Johansson's immortal humor. He plays with us as much as his bandmates. At once, the audience hears exotic war drums and opening salvos, then the steady, swooning bop of Paul Motian's Bill Evans Trio work.

Once Borel chimes in, Johansson has already introduced an entirely other element. His accordion has graced other recordings before, but none as prominently as this one. Grip and Borel introduce an otherworldly barrage of rapid-fire sirens and ominous bumps while the accordion flurries in strange, childlike rhythms. One can imagine Johansson as some lunatic organ grinder who stumbled drunkenly on the stage, while the official band tries to play around this boisterous interruption before welcoming him to the fold with open arms. As the group continues, bizarre forms are repurposed from the first section's wanderings. Like a display of troubadours battling for the attention and coffers of the carnival, all actors begin their finest and most pleasurable bleats and moans atop Grip and Johansson's metropolitan flurry. What results is uncomfortable, antagonistic, and, by the end, inexplicably moving, like some great drama, the subject of which they can only guess.

"Day Two" is somewhat of a different animal. For the first half, Wright takes a step back, leaving Borel to fill in the blanks. His horn is more verbose, more swooning than the sounds of his bandmates, leaving room for a more pleasant, even cool trio composition to emerge. Even when the accordion reappears at the halfway mark, the internal contradictions within the ensemble relax, uncovering a show of genuine camaraderie around Johansson's musical chicanery. When Wright returns, he is transformed into an industrial vessel among the distinctly medieval-sounding troupe. He is vivid and matter-of-fact in a sharp staccato. His toots and murmurs are not as efficient as the steam engine in Honegger's triumph—he delights in teetering off the edge of things; the whole band does, they purposefully push themselves to the very limit of disaster, only to "return" to a new normal, and continue the pattern anew.

Johansson's jokes and jibes are infectious, evidenced by how willing his cohorts are to entertain them. But he is, above all, a tenacious and demanding bandleader. He accepts nothing less than an absolute change in every one of his pupils. And by the close of the final night, there is a certain solace and satisfaction in hearing everyone construct their own, to hear their final multitonal panoply unfurl into a delirious, swinging adventure in the record's final minutes brings to mind a heated debate between members of an insane cabal. Wright's full- bodied lashes sear across Borel's fits and stammers, while Grip's slow pizzicato keeps them all walking on hot coals, all while Johansson returns to the maddening march of the first night, gleeful witness to his successors' sandbox antics. It is heartbreaking to let a sound like that go, but if there is any solace to be had in such a loss, it rests in the enduring flame of the maestro's madness; his serpentine tirade against creative stagnation still blazes in his conspirators. Because of him, jazz remains what it always should be: a refuge for children and their immortal dreaming.

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