Getting to Know Swedish Guitarist Tomas Janzon

courtesy of Kate Smith Promotions

The latest album from Swedish guitarist Tomas Janzon was released this past October; but, things being what they are, I only learned about it a little more than a week and a half ago. Given the restrictions on where I can currently go and a general absence of physical performance experiences, the timing could not have been better. Janzon studied guitar at the Musikhogskolan, the Royal School of Music in Stockholm, after which he began his professional career. This soon led to his move to the United States, which resulted in a Masters Degree in Classical Guitar from the Thornton School of Music at the University of California.

He now resides in New York; and the title of his latest album, 130th & Lenox, serves as the “coordinates” for where he lives in the Harlem neighborhood of Manhattan. Readers will note that the hyperlink leads to a CD Baby Web page, from which one may purchase the album either as a CD or as a digital download. This is yet another case in which Amazon.com has chosen not to recognize the sale of the physical product.

The album itself is the product of three recording sessions taking place over three consecutive years. The first two of these are trio sessions that Janzon recorded with Nedra Wheeler on bass and Donald Dean on drums, taking place on December 28, 2017 and December 29, 2018 at Nosound in Pasadena. The final session took place at Acoustic Recording in Brooklyn on May 25, 2019. Janzon led a quartet whose other members were Steve Nelson on vibraphone, Hilliard Greene on bass, and Chuck McPherson on drums.

The album has eleven tracks, three of which are Janzon originals. Three of the tracks fall into the “standards” genre: “Softly as in a Morning Sunrise” (Sigmund Romberg), “Have you Met Miss Jones?” (Richard Rogers, given the title “Have You Met Ms. Jones” on the track listing), and “Invitation” (Bronisław Kaper). The more modern composers include Thelonious Monk (“Monk’s Mood”), Wayne Shorter (“Iris”), Kenny Dorham (“Prince Albert”), and Sam Rivers (“Beatrice”). The final track is a traditional Swedish tune from Janzon’s childhood.

The prevailing rhetoric across this album is one of inventive introspection. He can present Romberg in the same sort of imaginatively unconventional syntax that one is more likely to encounter in Monk. His original “Hypnagogic,” on the other hand, basically documents how he came to terms with a rhythmic pulse consisting of eleven beats to the measure (and then get the other members of his Brooklyn combo to come to the same terms). The “bottom line,” then, is that this is an album of prodigious imagination; but that imagination is consistently reinforced by the attentive approaches to execution taken by both Janzon himself and his two sets of combo partners.