Bengt-Arne Wallin - The Birth and Rebirth of Swedish Folk Jazz (1998)

Jazz is World music in the best possible sense. Ever since jazz began to exist in the multicultural melting pot of New Orleans it was basically a mixture of musics from Africa and Europe and is by today the most important music created in the 20th century. Jazz is the musical language that fulfils the vision of a modern society of getting people together to create, work and communicate by searching for one common goal: freedom of the individual within a group of equals.

As Afro-American musicians such as John Coltrane rediscovered their musical heritage and made it part of their musical expression, likewise, and around the same time, European musicians became fascinated by their own rich and musically valid folk music and incorporated this into their jazz language. Bengt-Arne Wallin recorded in 1962 his "Old Folklore In Swedish Modern" stimulated by Quincy Jones who lived in Sweden at the time. In retrospect this was the "Birth Of Swedish Folk Jazz" and was a milestone of folk jazz made in Europe.

I remember very well the moment I heard this record for the first time during my honeymoon trip to Sweden. Being the label managerfor jazz at Philips at the time I was able to release this record in Germany in 1963. The release went by unnoticed then but the music never left me. Thirty years later, now a producer for my own label, I asked Michael Gibbs to write EUROPEANA and recorded it in 1995 with Joachim Kühn and the Radio Philharmonie Hannover for ACT 9220-2 and dedicated the record to Bengt-Arne Wallin. It was only in 1996 that I finally met with my hero in person while visiting my friend Nils Landgren in Stockholm and couldn "t rest before finding the original tapes of "Old Folklore In Swedish Modern" and to makethis great music available again afterthree decades of absence from the record market. Thanks to Rainer Haarmann who accepted the idea to invite Bengt-Arne Wallin to the JazzBaltica Festival and to have this music performed in public for the very first time by the Jazz-Baltica Ensemble in June of 1997 in Salzau, Germany. It became the greatest success in the seven year history of the JazzBaltica Ensemble and I am more then proud to be able to release the NDR live recording of 1997 side by side with the original recordings of 1962 as the Birth and the Re-Birth of Swedish Folk Jazz on my label ACT. Siegfried Loch