Iris Bergcrantz: Vi fanns förut
Ladybird

With Vi fanns förut (We existed before), Swedish jazz vocalist Iris Bergcrantz builds on the advances of her earlier critically acclaimed albums. Among the accolades she's received, her 2020 collection Young Dreams was honoured with a Danish Music Award nomination for Best Vocal Jazz Album, and two years later she issued Trasighet och Fransar, featuring reinterpretations of material by Swedish composer Olle Adolphsson. Bergcrantz also sings with the a cappella group Åkervinda, which was nominated for a Swedish Grammy in 2019 and in 2024 won a Danish Music Award.

While she's identified as a jazz singer, the music Bergcrantz creates doesn't lend itself to pigeonholing when other genres seep in. It's not uncommon, for example, for a song to augment jazz with Swedish folk, pop, and/or classical, the result hard to classify yet distinctly hers. On Vi fanns förut, she's joined by pianist Calle Brickman, contrabassist Anders Fjeldsted, and drummer Andreas Fryland, all three terrific musicians who distinguish her songs with playing wholly sympathetic to their moods and styles. Adding a quasi-classical element to the recording are violinists Hanna Helgegren and Kristina Ebbersten, violists Christopher Öhman and Matilda Brunström, and cellists Anna Wallgren and Filip Lundberg, whose playing brings warmth to the performances and lustre to the arrangements.

Comprising ten diverse songs, Vi fanns förut is a concept album that, according to Bergcrantz, “explores life's transitions—the difficulty of letting go of who you were to make space for who you are becoming.” To explore said issues of identity and relationships, she structured the album so that each song is linked to a tarot symbol embodying its theme, a concept carried over into the visual concept when the symbols for the ten songs are woven into an intricate cover image.

Enhancing an enchanting recording distinguished by sophisticated performances, arrangements, and songwriting is Bergcrantz's attractive voice and vocal approach, which favours tasteful restraint and a multi-octave range intent on conveying the essence of a song. Her voice cuts through these pieces with admirable clarity and finesse, such that the absence of over-the-top embellishment becomes one of the most appealing things about the set. Her partners follow her lead by emphasizing musicianship and setting individual ego aside. When a piano solo by Brickman appears, for instance, his statement is succinct and wholly aligned to the tone of the song (see the title track, for example).

Bergcrantz's vocal artistry is present the moment the luscious, strings-enveloping “Det Skulle Aldrig Bli” (“It Was Never Meant to Be”) initiates the set with a heartfelt reflection about the painful end of one life stage and uncertainty about what's to come. The coupling of her bright, agile vocal with the trio's infectious swing makes “Hoppet” (“The Hope”) particularly seductive—even if the song is about addiction, manipulation, and greed (“Hope can be a drug / One hit is never enough”). The breezily nostalgic “Oenigheter Om Mat” (“Disagreements About Food”) is highlighted by a lightly swinging jazz treatment, as well as the partnering of Bergcrantz's acrobatic swoon with Fjeldsted's assertive bass. The two pair as memorably during “Vargsången” (“The Wolf's Song,” its words by Astrid Lindgren and music Björn Isfält), especially when his thrusting bass lines animate the duet powerfully. Shifting gears, the traditional “Min Ros Min Lilja” (“My Rose My Lily”) delves into ominous territory with a cryptic folk dirge, the leader's haunted vocal augmented in this case by hand percussion and string flourishes.

April 2025