Esbjörn Svensson: HOME.S.
ACT

While solo recordings are ipso facto intimate and revealing, Esbjörn Svensson's HOME.S. is even more so for the circumstances under which it was created. A few weeks before his scuba diving-related death on June 14, 2008, he recorded an album's worth of solo material on a grand piano in the basement of his Swedish home, archived recordings his wife Eva returned to a decade later and, working with sound engineer Åke Linton, has now publicly shared. Adding to its value, HOME.S. is the sole album-length document of Svensson playing in a setting other than his Esbjörn Svensson Trio. That long-running unit with bassist Dan Berglund and drummer Magnus Öström issued its debut album, When Everyone has Gone, in 1993 and its last, Leucocyte, a few months after Svensson's passing.

In Eva's words, the nine tracks, all titled after letters in the Greek alphabet, follow one another “like pearls on a string.” The set begins in a reflective mood, with the tender and elegant “Alpha” exemplifying the sophistication of classical music and the explorative open-mindedness of jazz. Svensson was playing for himself, but the performance is as probing and engaged as if it were being done before a live audience. “Beta” and “Gamma” see him going even deeper within, his touch delicate and the plaintive music examined methodically as it develops. For all that HOME.S. is intimate, it's not one-dimensional. Witness, for example, the deep blues-gospel turn “Gamma” takes during its second half and counterpoint in “Epsilon” and “Theta” so intricate it would do J. S. Bach proud. If “Zeta” emphasizes Svensson's classical side, “Eta” traffics in rousing dynamism, the pianist's radiant playing sounding almost R&B-inflected.

December 2022