Serenity is the double album with which the Bobo Stenson Trio followed Reflections and War Orphans, and its widest-ranging programme. Over two discs and some ninety minutes the Swedish pianist and his partners move between their own pieces, collective improvisations, jazz, Swedish folk music, Cuban song and early twentieth-century composition.
Stenson plays piano, Anders Jormin double bass and Jon Christensen drums. Stenson and Christensen had been frequent partners since a 1969 session, and Stenson first heard Jormin in the early 1980s, struck by a dry, individual beat he compared to the sarod. The trio is a group of equals, and Stenson has said that it is "impossible to be a 'leader' of a group that has Jon Christensen in it." The album was recorded in April 1999 at the HageGården Music Center in Brunskog, Sweden, with Åke Linton as engineer, and produced by Manfred Eicher.
Jormin's T. opens the set, bell-like bass harmonics over finely meshed patterns from Christensen, before three short improvised Prints, each foregrounding one player. In East Print Christensen solos quietly while bass and piano take the rhythmic roles. The covers range widely: Wayne Shorter's Swee Pea, Silvio Rodríguez's El Mayor, Hanns Eisler's Brecht setting Der Pflaumenbaum (1935) and his Rimbaud Gedicht (1950), and Alban Berg's Die Nachtigall, a Theodor Storm setting from the Seven Early Songs. The title piece is Jormin's adaptation of a 1919 song by Charles Ives on a hymn text by John Greenleaf Whittier, and Lorens Brolin's Polska of Despair, a tune handed down through Swedish oral tradition, appears twice, once on each disc. Among the originals are Jormin's Simple & Sweet and Stenson's Golden Rain and Tonus, while two brief pieces, More Cymbals and Extra Low, are credited jointly to Jormin, Stenson and Eicher.
Writing in the Los Angeles Times, Don Heckmann heard "stunning technique and subtle emotional undercurrents" and called the tracks "gripping examples" of a European artist reflecting his own culture rather than parroting American standards. The album was a record of the month in Audio, Stereoplay and Fono Forum, and a Choc du mois in the French Jazzman.
This is the two-CD set on ECM Records, catalogue number ECM 1740/41, released in June 2000.
