Nils Landgren - 4 Wheel Drive (CD)

Release Date: 03/15/19

This German-Swedish supergroup is like a high-performance four-cylinder engine with all the gears meshing perfectly. And the fuel: jazz.

Nils Landgren, Michael Wollny, Lars Danielsson and Wolfgang Haffner - four leading figures in European jazz who know each other well and who have appreciated each other’s work for many years have now got together. True, their paths have crossed many times before…but here for the very first time are the four friends as a quartet. “4 Wheel Drive”, the title of the album reflects the equal role which each of the four musicians has had in setting the direction for the quartet. They take to the road together, both as superb soloists and as team players. In addition to one original composition from each of them, Landgren, Wollny, Danielsson and Haffner also decided that they would focus on four living creative forces from the recent history of music and interpret their tunes, Paul McCartney, Billy Joel, Phil Collins and Sting. The 4 Wheel Drive musicians have also used the classic songs they have chosen as starting-points for their own excursions; so McCartney’s “Maybe I’m Amazed” becomes a subtly-lit jazz ballad. Freed from everything extraneous, and transformed by Wollny’s prepared piano, Billy Joel’s “She’s Always A Woman” is a mysterious and enraptured love song. The musicians interpret Genesis’ song “That’s All” as a collage of instrumental sound. And for Sting’s song about letting go, “If You Love Somebody Set Them Free”, they find a fitting musical parallel: the freedom of jazz leads naturally to Landgren’s powerful trombone improvisation. The album is bookended with music from the fast lane: it opens with Wollny’s fast-paced showpiece “Polygon”, and closes with Danielsson’s “4WD”. 4 Wheel Drive as an ensemble is like a high-performance four-cylinder engine with all the gears meshing perfectly. And the fuel: jazz.