This is an official bootleg, i.e., a documentary recording made with the permission of the artist, at a very dense and hectic place in her career, during a concert series (three concerts) in a Stockholm gallery where she also exhibited her paintings simultaneously! This is in fact the final of those three concerts, when the two called-in young Stockholm musicians – Samuel Starck on keyboards and David Lindvall on double bass – had become familiar with Sophie Dunér and what she required. I also heard them on their first night at Gummeson’s Gallery, and for sure, they’re much tighter and precise and confident on this third night.

Sophie Dunér talks in jazz phrases too. I realized that when I interviewed her just a day before her opening at Gummeson’s. Her views come across in twirling, twisting and bending lingual tensions, flexing the morphemes in and out of earshot, pulling the flow of metaphors in elasticity and playfulness, the sentences dancing like mirages on the horizon, suddenly rushing right up in your face – and she molds the string of words into artistic mirrorings of their inner significance. Her way of talking, of expressing herself in language – written or spoken – comes completely natural! This is who she is, as an artist, as a woman, as a human being, as a being in this bulging, jazzy universe!

Listening to this Gummeson Gallery recording and working with the music and texts, it dawns upon me with brute force what an excellent, yes, brilliant, composer Sophie Dunér is, in a complete, genuine sterling way. Her texts – intelligent, biting, sardonic, parodic, humorous but also serious and gentle – are at one with her tunes, her arrangements, and such is the vibrant atmosphere around her creativity that I don’t fear to say that she is among the top ten writers of contemporary jazz tunes in the world. Furthermore, her interpretations of her own songs – her intonation, her phrasing, her absolute stage presence – set her apart from most of her comparable contemporaries; allows her a very special place in the limelight – and I can only wish that she will sweep the world into breathless surrender – because she’s worth it!

The blue texts in white fields below are Sophie Dunér's own comments about the songs.

Marionettes (Sophie Dunér) deals with the stupidity of guys, how they might fuck with your head in a subtle way – and I call them marionettes since I want to be the one in power and pull them any way I wish, making them do what I want!
The sound of the tune is somewhat reminiscent of the Cure 1980s, which I blend with jazz, giving it a cocky effect.

Sophie counts in the tune, and dives right into the speedy procedure while keyboardist Samuel Starck plays around the vocalist’s ever-changing expressions, her talk-singing transforming into sudden improvisations of wordless singing in extending, stretchy, winding glacier stream melting-water meanderings. Starck leaves his piano sound and dwells a while inside a candy bar elasticity that wraps layer after layer of brown-red sugaring bands around the gallery event, around our senses.
The swiftly hopping and marching – yeah, jerkily staggering – cartoon music starts full speed down a fantasy back alley (a Fritz the Cat malice!) – but soon it breaks in a way that almost makes you fall flat on your face as the gathered force fills with heavy inertia – until Sophie gallantly picks up again and delivers her text in wonderfully varying vocal expressions that change so fast it’s impossible to keep track, unless you play the piece back at a lower speed – and she keeps changing back and forth between these contradictory tempi! This is hit material, amazingly exciting and – vibrant! It’s vibrant with a certain kind of edgy energy! This is Sophie the Witch in her most toxic mood – with a wry smile and glittering eyes! Man, if this kills you, at least it’s love at last sight!

Lush Life (Billy Strayhorn) has always attracted me. The text is so picturesque. I love singing rubato, which I do a lot in this song during part A. The contrast is then falling in part B. And bars and Paris are nice places!

Here Sophie comes at you like a softly swaying, blue, velvety balcony curtain, moving almost imperceptibly in the warm evening air of Paris – and you’re immersed in expensive fragrances, the full moon glittering in the tilting roofs of a metropolis…
Surely, this is seductive singing, drenched in sensuality that is heading directly into eroticism, fingertips and eyelashes glowing like the tips of cigarettes in shadowy nocturnal anticipation…
Samuel Starck’s piano introduction sets the tone exactly, and Sophie enters softly in irresistible femininity through the century-old tradition of Lush-Life composition, which in itself pries open so many Western bar room romanticisms in your resemblances; those piercing, haunting side-glances and the possibility of late-night ecstasies in soft Paris hotel beds… or, desperately, up against a back alley brick wall in the sleazy districts, moaning like horny dogs among the trash cans…

Up Again (Sophie Dunér) – how I regret something I’ve done, trying to surface again. I wrote it when I grew tired of contemporary jazz and wanted to do a funny Dixie tune. At the time I’d heard REAL Dixie, which has nothing to do with the old, woody, sawdust senior jazz I’d heard as a child. It really was hip! Simple chords with a tearing, humorous energy!

Samuel Starck opens the tune in a jacketyjacking, bouncing Hammond organ rhythm, reminding me slightly of early after-night-shift-at-the steelworks-mornings in late 1967 Skitköping when I used to play a Don’t-Let-The-Sun-Catch-You-Crying LP with Billy Preston as I fell asleep, my 18-year-old body succumbing to the gravity which was always on, then as now… Wow!
Talk about hit material! This is not just that; this IS a hit if ever there was one! After hearing the song just a couple of times, the lines keep recurring in my defenseless mind: “up, up, up again, bring me up, up, up again…!
Yeah, this tune brings you onto your feet, no matter how sober and stiff you may be; there is no other solution to this melody outside a jerky, bouncing, thudding and soooooaaaaring dance across the room, through the door, out into the oooopen!
Man, Sophie’s lines cut like lightning through the fabric of the melody, and David Lindvall’s double bass provides stilts on which to walk-dance! I see a stilt dance against bright light (top hats and all), like riding a motorcycle through a bamboo grove at sundown: intense movement, electrifying rhythms, words like swords! Impressive! Completely persuasive! Goddam, bring me up, up, up again!
When Sophie glides out into staggering wordless vocals, angled like the ruthless flight of July swifts around the corners of the bastions of Savonlinna, you feel your senses just giving in, relaxing for the dizzying ride, letting it happen, just letting it happen!

Jack the Ripper (Sophie Dunér) – simply about some girls liking daft old men. In the original Ripper story the hookers were curious about who he was and they didn’t remain at home when they ought to… so it’s a parallel to daily life; nice boys will not get to kiss sweet girls.
I use a lot of minor seconds in the chords. That creates a piercing effect that goes well with the text. Also the interlude passage after the solo, which rises step by step through the register, has a… haunting effect… like at the conclusion, where I wrap things up with an accelerando…

The outset – onset! – has this dark force about it; ominous, venomous, dangerous… and Samuel Starck sounds like two musicians, playing one keyboard as a piano; the other like some old-time fuzz box! The piano part hammers out a swift and sharply dotted melody line, while the harsh fuzz box audio is sprayed in dense showers along the way!
Meanwhile, David Lindvall plays his double bass like a Bill Haley slap bass, inserting a clicking, percussive element into the impudent wall of sound.

The melody gets a flying start, from 1 – 100 in 0 seconds, so to say, and you immediately have the impression of something relentless and unavoidable, albeit in a guise smooth and shiny as an October chestnut; an uppercut delivered in a silk glove!

Enters Sophie; her voice as clear and shiny as a reflection in the tediously polished hardwood of the Knight’s Hall of an old British country estate! You can’t but surrender to this combination. Another great hit! I’ve hardly heard anything as perfect and right on the money as this Sophie Dunér composition, performed by herself and her temporary crew at her own art exhibition at the Gummeson Gallery in the 2005 month of September! Outstanding! Jeez, am I glad I recorded this!!!

Sophie excels in all kinds of vocal motions, and then she halts right in her pace, in a soft musical hush, as she sings “life is for living”, as if to scoop up some ice-cream or other nutritious substances, like a seal breathing momentarily through a whole in the ice… until she throws herself backwards into the rushing torrent of her melody, continuing full throttle: “she likes his vest…” Oh man, what a treat!

The sound of Sophie’s glaring and shining vocal serpentines sweeps ‘round the gallery, leaving shreds of Jack the Ripper words and text lines along the walls, where her paintings hang – among them the Jack the Ripper painting! It all connects, the moment is one, and it’s here and now! This magic moment spins for good now on this gallery bootleg! Praise be!

I pull myself together, put on a black shirt, burn some Nag Champa incense and continue writing:

In the midst of these rancid, pounding, love-hate lyrics Samuel Starck breaks loose in a flabbergasting catharsis of brown sugar elasticity on one of his keyboards, sucking the air out of me like a little girl out of a Toy corner-of-the-mouth bubblegum, and I deflate in sheer joy at this wrenching, out-of-tune shadow-play of harmonics; this rosy-cheeked daredevil sonic compassion under the loving and giggling, relaxed and amused supervision of Miss Dunér, who encouraged these kinds of controlled freak-out sound-bursts at the rehearsal I attended in a Stockholm basement a few days prior. Samuel Starck pours thick, brown chocolate sauce out of a pitcher that he happily holds up high and moves around in outstreched motions, away from his body but making everything else thick and brown with chocolate sauce... Well, that's how it sounds, anyway...!

Starck came across in stark statements at Gummeson’s, tying these thin, brown, bulging, winding, curling bands of brown sugar audio around our stupefied perceptions! Hurrah!
David Lindvall was ever-present, like a good bassist should be, providing the sticks and stones stability of a terrain, a topography, for this madman Starck to explore, and for this angry, giggling fairy queen Dunér to veer through in gallantly persuasive virulent utterances carried on shock-waves of oral-cavity-modulated vocals, condensing like lacquer in thin, shiny layers on everything at Gummeson’s Gallery on 17th September 2005, leaving a ghostly glow of spiritual radiation in the place when we switched off the lights and left for the chilly Stockholm streets, much later that night… and I could almost hear the Dalai lama laughing happily in the back of my mind…
Right after this prune-faced improvisation, Starck climbs a couple of flights of ascending pianist staircases (or is he describing a long, double pearl necklace that would surround Sophie’s neck nicely!?) – and Sophie returns softly through the well-deserved applause that, jazz-manner-like, was delivered after his frantic solo.

Sophie bends and flexes her voice in dancing figures as she continues a couple of minutes more of the song, finally rising into the higher pitches in wordless modulations, as the tune picks up speed crazily until it ends in triumph! What a show, what a tune!

Sophie has published the text of Jack the Ripper on her homepage, but she had made considerable changes to it – and some downright omissions! - when she sang it at Gummeson’s. Perhaps these changes just come over time, from performance to performance, the way Dylan always does it – or maybe Sophie has some deeper reasons for the alterations; I don’t know. Here is the version she performed, anyway:

In the original version you can read a verse like this – heavy writing:

Takes the breath out of you, doesn’t it! It reminds me of something a fiery fiancée of mine once wrote, about wanting to live in a house with walls of granite and no roof to shield from the skies! It’s like an involuntary expression of primeval, shuddering, animalistic life!

The Rain in Spain (Sophie Dunér) – I mix a stiff, theatrical bass line with an emerging groovy chorus. The guitar or the keyboard visualizes the raindrops, musically inverted – I saw my mirror crashing – (mirrored drops): text-related music…
The text deals with how I see a situation from the outside looking in; how you may, simultaneously, feel on top and also like a loser. I talk about unwise personalities who judge a situation, myself, my other self, some other person… “I saw myself through binocular eyes, the camera was rolling, it was all in the past”. Past, present. The harmonies are inverted back and forth into various positions.

This is the song that Sophie would like to provide the title for her new CD on C.I.M.P., that she has recently recorded Upstate New York, and which will hit the stores around Christmas.
At the rehearsal in Stockholm the day before the opening at the Gummeson Gallery she instructed her keyboardist – Samuel Starck – to play raindrops… and he did. I immediately heard analogies to the piano pieces of Gerhard Rühm, and this playing also, to some extent, referred to Terry Riley. The tiny rehearsal space, two stories below ground at Hantverkargatan 11 in Stockholm, lit up in a sudden raindrop illumination, tangible blue droplets falling through our imagination, in an animated film of the mind, induced by Sophie’s ideas and Starck’s response to them.

Those initial raindrop fingerings across the keyboard dance like the sparse drops of a drifting rain curtain up the street, the dark guises of passers-by unfurling their umbrellas like sudden mushrooms up and down the sidewalk against the storefront lights, feet moving more rapidly, car doors banging shut, the fumes of exhaust pushed down by the rain… and there is the atmosphere that those first bars inspire!

“I had my coffee so black…” – and there she is, Sophie Dunér, sketching an atmosphere, a feeling, a whole state of mind and the spirit of the times… in a brief linguistic gesture, in a few words and a piano accompaniment of loosely placed points of reference, up the street, along the sidewalk, with those neon lights reflected in your glasses! Splendid!

The reflective, a bit remorseful, aspect of this song adds to the melancholy and the velvet emotions; wet pavements, car headlights reflected in late night asphalt, the absolute contradiction between the inside of the bars and the restaurants and the almost asocial pedestrian predicament outside, in the rain, in the dark – and all these memories and feelings burning inside your head like a match, consuming you like the fire consumes the match… as your coat is damp from the walk in the rain and your inside an endless series of dreams, hall upon hall opening in obscurity, as your steps echo between the houses, inside the hollowness of your desolation… and yet, Sophie sings so lightly, like an angel unaffected by gravity: “here come the raindrops falling…” – and this is part of the illusion, part of the trick, to sail lightly amongst the ruins of your life, like Lili Marlene in post-war Berlin, to break down dark pain with a light kiss, to restore yourself by way of attitude, by way of an accepting resistance… and this song really does fill me with contradictory feelings, opposing forces – that will have to co-exist, and do, all this time… because I know that this body is just a cover for cosmic processes, just a focal point of conflicting wills, paradoxical emotions, passably joined in this anatomy called Loco, called Sophie, called anything you like, called you and me and him and her and it and what…

Mac the Knife (Kurt Weill) – hmmm… Kurt Weill is cool! I want more cabaret in my version, and this song is fun, for it can be perceived as corny as well as cool, depending on how you chose to do it.
The text is bold, really – a shark described as man – subtle thriller… intelligent. But you have to avoid sounding like some old, wooden Dixie swing jazz…

Well, what can I say… This is SUCH a standard song, that you’d think it was over and done with, buried in the heaps of culture, remembered with affection… BUT Sophie Dunér has other ideas, and she delivers a great song of contemporary relevance out of this rock of ages! The boys provide a strong, anticipating commencement, piano and slap bass, into which Sophie dances with small shuffling steps, holding back some, singing beneath her breath, like a shy girl at a school concert – but it’s an illusion; she soon peers up from beneath her hat – figuratively speaking – and comes through to the fore, transpiring out of the cigarette smoke – again figuratively -, onto the edge of commitment, ever so lightly caressing the song, before letting it fly off like a white dove… and Samuel Starck ends on a Hammond note… as Mr. Weill smiles inwardly in cabaret heaven…

A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Sophie Dunér) – a romantic, Swedish-inspired ballad.
Observe that the second chord in each bar lies on the 4th and anticipates across into the following bar. This renders a special personality and a sound that colors the whole piece. There is quite a bit of tension, transforming, though, into release. The text is soft, and I wrote it because I was a bit weary of all the aggressive texts I have…

This is a magnificent tune, as powerful as, for instance, a ballad like Don’t Cry For Me, Argentina - and it’s a Sophie Dunér original. Yes, she is an extremely powerful composer and text writer. She can be counted among the best – because she doesn’t do this just once or twice, but time and again. She delivers song after song, the one more stunning than the other. Midsummer Night’s Dream is a truly lyrical, melodically fully-fledged master ballad, a classic from beginning till end, already one of my all-time favorites.

Come to think of it, the instrumental beginning – piano and bass – sounds so convincing, so… obvious, so… established and full of jazzman tradition, that I’m confused for a bit, and I almost expect to hear Monica Zetterlund as Sophie Dunér gets all the circuits of her existence working towards a magic deliverance of her own masterpiece, and perhaps those initial seconds can have me confuse Samuel Starck with Bill Evans… but don’t let that destroy your career, Samuel! It was just a hunch I had through this smoky ballad beginning; this holy, nocturnal tendency towards enlightenment…

Oh, the diligence of the song line, the latticework of the double bass, the blue notes of the piano like a glass bead of prayers through a laidback intimacy without fear; certain of love, of a home; domiciliary rights in the Universe! A Midsummer Night’s Dream! Blessed!

Caravan (Juan Tizol & Duke Ellington) – a grand Latino favorite – begins modally; a perfect piece for my improvisations; I love to improvise in Latin tunes, more than in swing. I’m not that hot for scat; I enjoy ethno improvisations more.

A standard jazz tune treated by our Sophie, with all the expertise of someone who seems to be born out of jazz into jazz, sustaining herself on jazz to create jazz! She pulls on the melody, drags some, stretches a little, gets into wordlesnesses again, riding her own voice like was she riding a wild stallion at the Mesquite Rodeo in Southeast Dallas! The listener really has to hang on by the mane as Sophie flies her voice across the dusty arena! The boys also get to immerse themselves in something truly standard for a substantial part of the duration, and they come through with flying colors!

Two-Time Losers (Sophie Dunér) – about a broad who trades love for money. Both of them become unhappy losers.
Here I use minor seconds at the outset; a stale sound which develops into soft swing and later switches over into a 12/8 beat where it swaggers some more – when I sing “…their life begins” – and it’s fitting that the bassist moves a little more there (when their life together starts… movement!)
In the beginning there is more of a statement, where the exaggerated stiffness fits.

Here we go with an original bumpy Dunér creation once more, and once again I get this hit sensation. Sophie makes no flip sides; a term we used long ago for the not-so-important fillers on the backside of hit singles during the vinyl age! Sophie only produces sterling value, goddammit! I can’t believe I sit here with a bootleg CD I just sort of happened to cut from a concert held for a handful of visitors to an art gallery! Amazing! Startling! Revealing! Yes, it almost scares me a little! I’m sure I don’t understand all the implications yet – but I do believe this cut will some day be mentioned in the annals of jazz history!
Samuel Starck gets a chance to brandish his slightly out-of-tune playfulness again in Two-Time Losers, as he paints in thick layers of sticky, chocolate-brown acoustic color in his cadenza! Jeez! I hear Sophie laughing midway! Yes, high spirits in the gallery!

At Last (Mack Gordin & Harry Warren) – I have always liked this piece. Romantic, heard for the first time during a train journey to Abisko in Swedish Lapland. I believe I was in love with some American at that time, and the song fitted the situation brilliantly… so now I finally want to do a version of it – but just with bass. Since the song is so well known, I can afford to do it with a lone bass without having it sound too out…!

A bass and song duet out of Gummeson’s Gallery at the conclusion of a wonderful concert, which just barely made it onto CD! Shit, this is really heavy! David Lindvall, standing tall, topping himself off with flourishing red locks, grabs his double bass and sets the pace in dark, deep, heavily placed notes, stomping into the melody in a working-clothes manner, and imagined, sturdy Red Wing boots…
It works beautifully, and my ears are transfixed on the bass line through the conclusion of a sublime concert half a story below Stockholm’s Strandvägen… and I am hypnotized by the bass all through the song, because of its cleverly and sturdily applied rhythm, its tightly brown vibrations; string theory transformed into string practice – at it’s best, it’s very best!
Sophie Dunér articulates this favorite of hers with tender loving affection, and the result, bass and vocals and our love for life, blows me away!
The realization, in its bare and naked necessity, kind of reminds me of Elvis Presley’s Young and Beautiful, from Jailhouse Rock, if you catch my drift, hehe! Yeah, magnificent, and a worthy conclusion of a completely wonderful concert!