[TR24][OF] Viktoria Tolstoy & Jacob Karlzon - A Moment of Now - 2013 (Jazz, Vocal Jazz)

Viktoria Tolstoy, vocals
Jakob Karlzon, Steinway grand piano, pump organ, celesta, Fender Rhodes
Special Guest
Jocke Bergström, vocals (on Send One Your Love)

Viktoria Tolstoy
is a highly celebrated and respected international jazz vocalist and her numerous success stories are all a product of this explosive natural supertalent. Viktoria has never taken a single singing class thus she also owns that little perfect difference that delivers her clearly strong and wonderfully untamed, vibrant sound. She'll capture the moment on any given occasion and will outperform herself from one grand evening to the next.

Viktoria reaches all the way and her colorful, spontaneous persona will by all means make one forget to breathe for not only a short moment. Viktoria is already on the very top, yet once again aiming up.

Viktoria has been saluted by media wherever she has landed since she first grabbed that microphone, and rest assure, this show will go on. We suggest you buckle up. Expect a lot.

Jacob Karlzon’s
music resides in the intersections where Scandinavian expressions such as space, melancholy and sensitivity blend with heat and passion.

Jacob has been compared to such luminaries as Keith Jarrett, Bill Evans and Sweden’s own legendary pianist Jan Johansson. His playing style boasts technical brilliance, great rhythmic and harmonic complexity and a perfect feeling for form.

Jacob Karlzon is already a jazz veteran. His first album came out in 1992, since then he has recorded five more in his own name, and featured on at least 40 others. He has been showered with distinctions and prizes over the years. In 1997 he won the Jazz in Sweden award with the Malmö combo Blue Pages and was voted Newcomer of the Year by Swedish Radio’s annual jazz critic poll. In 2010 he was voted Musician of the Year by Swedish Radio’s annual jazz critic poll and was rewarded the Django d’Or as Contemporary Star of Jazz.

He has played with many other leading jazz musicians: Billy Cobham, Kenny Wheeler, Bob Berg, Tim Hagans, Jeff Ballard, Norma Winstone, Cæcilie Norby, Nils Landgren, to name but a few.

Jacob released his first solo piano album in the autumn of 2008. The third volume in a new series of improvised piano music, Improvisational three had Jacob interpret and be inspired by French composer Maurice Ravel. The album was enthusiastically received by the critics.

The most important forum for Jacob, however, is his own trio. JK3 has been touring in Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Lithuania, Germany and UK playing in clubs and festivals for raving audiences and critics.

Intimate duo work

Though there are many beautiful singing voices in jazz today, Viktoria Tolstoy is one of a kind. A great melodramatist of jazz who is also bipolar, she makes happiness sound fragile and threatened, and bitterness sweet and enchanting. She has framed and perfected this art on a conceptual level since becoming an ACT artist in 2003, whether concentrating on material from Esbjörn Svensson – whose e.s.t. began to some extent as her accompanying trio – or, most recently, on Herbie Hancock, classical originals, Swedish standards or repertoire from Russia, the home of her ancestors.

Her latest album 'A Moment Of Now' is her most frank recording yet – for one simple reason: 'Jacob [Karlzon] and I are the concept this time,' says Viktoria. Indeed it is an intimate album by the duo that focuses on their musical partnership. Karlzon has been Tolstoy's trusted companion on her band projects for almost 15 years now, his playing thrives on nuances, transitions, ambiguities – be they inspired by classics such as Grieg or hard rockers the likes of KoRn. It is a partnership that shows no signs of abating, despite Karlzon’s own highly successful trio that bears his name. 'We each generally know in advance what the other is thinking and is going to do, without either of us having to say anything. It's almost a bit spooky,' says Tolstoy of the intuitive understanding between the two.

Their style depends on melodies like a fish depends on water, and 14 of the best are brought together on 'A Moment Of Now'. As Tolstoy explains, they are 'songs we've heard a lot in recent years, and that imposed themselves on us, but also some that were entirely new to us and were really a challenge”. This has resulted in a selection that sounds entirely coherent and as if created especially for these two musicians, even though its component parts come from the most diverse, stylistic, and often surprising backgrounds. From the classical 'Apres Un Reve' by the Frenchman Gabriel Faurè, to Stevie Wonder's soul-pop 'Send One Your Love' – on which Tolstoy invited Jocke Bergström, a new face in these climes, to share in a vocal duet that simply takes your breath away – to the jazzy 'Shadow And Light' by Joe Zawinul. Thanks to Tolstoy's father, who suggested Phil Collins' 'Against All Odds', the entire history of Genesis is represented, so to speak, with 'Taking It All Too Hard' and Peter Gabriel's 'Red Rain' also rebooted on the album.

Beyond global hits like these or Alanis Morissette's biggest success 'Hand In My Pocket', the album also includes new discoveries like 'Satisfied' from the almost-forgotten funk virtuoso Lewis Taylor and 'Deep River' from Norwegian jazz saxophonist Benedik Hofseth. Among the pieces, three were originally instrumentals; namely 'Apres Un Reve' (based on Faurè's 'Apres Un Reve'), the Pat Metheny revamp 'A Moment Of Now', and Karlzon's own composition 'Scent Of Snow”. For these, Anna Alerstedt, the fantastic songwriter who Tolstoy discovered in 2008 for 'My Russian Soul', once again pens profound and memorable lyrics.

The ease with which Viktoria Tolstoy and Jacob Karlzon can change the fundamental character of songs that otherwise seem to be set in stone is quite spectacular. The best example of this is their interpretation of Mark King's 'Lessons In Love', transformed from a loud up-tempo song by the funk band Level 42 into a melancholy ballad. There’s also Cole Porter's classic 'I Concentrate On You', which rings out as a Nordic anthem, and which in the middle section is even reminiscent of Esbjörn Svensson's 'Love Is Real'. But above all, what the songs all have in common is an overwhelming quietude and power. The weighty and complex sounds light and easy – just note the jumps and key changes on 'Satisfied', where the subtle nuances and vocals change and shape the music.

There is a calmness and strength in the music that comes from experience and draws from the tried and trusted. For example, Nils Landgren returns as the producer, while the album was recorded with the familial team at Nilento Studios in Goteborg. 'I felt safe and well looked after at every moment,” Tolstoy recalls, “Never change a winning team!'. This is how a fascinating and completely unique moment in her and Karlzon's oeuvre was born—and it is one that will remain.