This delightful gem from the archives captures some illuminating encounters between US jazz stars and the lively and welcoming Scandinavian jazz world a decade before the emergence of Jan Garbarek and the region’s other gamechanging originals. American bass and cello virtuoso Oscar Pettiford was a key figure on the 50s Copenhagen jazz scene, and these 17 sparky tracks represent his dream-team partnership with the short-lived Swedish pianist and composer Jan Johansson and collaborations with guests, including that romantic poet of the tenor saxophone Stan Getz. Pettiford is nimbly and expressively swinging on cello on the cruising Sonny Boy, and Johannson epitomises soulful jazz-ballad playing on the evergreen Willow Weep for Me. Getz arrives at a dry-toned purr on Pettiford’s La Verne Walk, and unwraps I Remember Clifford with his inimitably quivering romantic vibrato. Johansson briefly plays a solo account of the famous Ack Värmeland, Du Sköna (reinvented as the jazz vehicle Dear Old Stockholm) in a haunting manner somewhere between a jazz ballad and a carol. The set is an old jazz chronicle, but buzzes with irrepressible life.
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