Elin Forkelid - Elin Forkelid Plays for Trane (2020)

It's hardly this week's biggest news that John Coltrane's playing style and technique have influenced legions of jazz saxophonists. Elin Larsson Forkelid is one of them. But above all, she has absorbed all the emotions that lived in the giant's music, such as mildly singing tenderness, seeking rootlessness, wildly aspiring liberation and so the calmly majestic, spiritual.

So she is rowing home this demanding and demanding album project with her gang. A hint already appears in the opening track "Compassion", where the group twists and turns on the extremely simple, eternally repeated theme, flows out in other keys, comes back and turns the intensity up and down.

Immediately afterwards, the quintet caresses the beautiful ballad "Central park west" without frills, and then builds up the late Coltrane composition "Ogunde" from the first floating soprano saxophones on top of David Stackenäs' vibrating electric guitar via Mattias Ståhl's floating vibraphone loops paired with Jon Fält's extremely moving, drumming to a climax where all five release the inhibitions. The gentle hymn "Dear Lord" then takes everything down to earth again.

Flexible teammates such as Stackenäs and Ståhl, who fix both melodic playing, hardbop scales and abrasive dissonances, are almost necessary if a tribute to John Coltrane's 60s is to be successful. But the most decisive factor is Elin Forkelid's own authority, passion and goal orientation.