Project Four years after “Cantando”, a new album from the Bobo Stenson Trio – recorded in Lugano last December – explores a broad arc of material. Here we find: free playing (the trio has its own, fresh approach to collective improvising), tunes by Bill Evans (“Your Story”, offered here as a tribute to Paul Motian, for whom this tune was a favourite) and by George Russell (“Event VI” from “Living Time”, another piece associated with Evans), Danish composer Carl Nielsen’s “Oft Am I Glad”, a Norwegian hymn (in an arrangement by Anders Jormin and folk singer Sinikka Langeland), contemporary composition by Norway’s Ola Gjeilo, a Wolf Biermann protest song, Argentine composer Ariel Ramírez’s folkloric “La Peregrinación”, and more. Wide-ranging repertoire has become a hallmark of Bobo Stenson recordings. But it’s not just the eclecticism that is striking: Bobo Stenson, Anders Jormin and Jon Fält take their far-flung sources and make of them an organic music that sings with its own voice. As the New York Times has noted “Mr. Stenson makes fairly sublime piano trio records without over-arranging, overplaying or over-bandleading. In his mid-60s now, he’s the repository of half a century of the development of free jazz, in particular the European post-1960s kind, with its folk and classical leanings. Yet he wears it all lightly. In his recent records you don’t hear strategies or contentions but a natural working flow.”