I met up with Sophie Dunér in a tiny basement rehearsal space in Stockholm on a mellow September Wednesday afternoon of 2005. She was just in from Redwood, New York State, where she has recorded a new CD for C.I.M.P. Records (Creative Improvised Music Projects) which is due in the stores come April 2006.

At the time of the rehearsal and the interview, Sophie Dunér was also setting up an arts exhibition at the renowned Gummeson Gallery in one of the most fashionable districts of Stockholm City, on Strandvägen. The Wednesday rehearsal was also geared towards the exhibition, because being the versatile and highly creative artist that she is, Sophie combined the art exhibition at Gummeson’s with three concerts to be held in the gallery, starting at the opening on the Thursday after the interview and continuing the following nights.

For the rehearsal she had contacted two young and prolific Stockholm musicians; Samuel Starck on keyboards and David Lindvall on double bass.
I got to the address on Hantverkargatan ahead of Sophie, and was invited down into the basement by David Lindvall, who was the fist to arrive.
The space was so tiny that I first found it hard to secure a position for my camera tripod, but as we cleared a few areas from debris, I saw that it would be possible anyhow.

I rode the lift two stories up, to street level, and found Sophie outside, sporting a funky hat, having a smoke on the sidewalk. We greeted each other generously. We have met before, in late summer 2004 in Kürten, Germany, at the Stockhausen Courses, where I was engaged as a photographer and writer by Stockhausen, and where Sophie Dunér participated as a singer, expanding her jazz singing in the direction of art music also, having made pre-studies of a few of Stockhausen’s works.

The first afternoon at the Stockhausen Courses I spent a few hours with Sophie and a piano lady from Dallas, Texas, as they were going through Tierkreis spontaneously in one of the rooms at the school facility.
After having worked with Stockhausen for four years he and I had a disagreement on photo copyrights and ended our collaboration, but Sophie attended the Stockhausen Courses this year also.
With the Courses, the recording sessions in New York and the art exhibition and concerts at Gummeson’s, it is a hectic period for Sophie Dunér.

It was interesting and rather amazing to see how she got on with the two young musicians. This was their first encounter, and after just a brief conversation, the three of them poring over Sophie’s scores and notes, they fell right into the playing itself, Sophie alternately sitting and standing up, hat still on her head, gently but firmly guiding Samuel and David through her intentions.
Sophie Dunér writes most of her material herself, although she ventures into her very own versions of jazz standards too.

A particularly moving aspect of her rehearsal with the two young musicians was the way she encouraged them to explore for themselves, and how she invited them, at certain stages of some of the songs, to get into adventurous and perhaps unexpected ways of sounding, bringing out fresh and edgy alterations of the compositions. It was very refreshing to see her professional talent working so intimately with her young cohorts.
Sophie’s encouragement brought much more brilliance out of her collaboration with the keyboardist and the bassist than could have been expected from a meeting on such short notice and with such a brief time in which to get the set together. She suggested that the boys – especially the keyboardist – use their ingenuity to come up with their own ideas, and when she found it fitting she made room for those ideas in her performance.

After about four hours of rehearsal Sophie and I got out of there, only to slip into a nearby café where I interviewed her over a cup of coffee at a small round table in a corner of the room. We had about half an hour for the interview, until Sophie had to get together with the proprietor of the Gummeson Gallery to hang her paintings, price them and get everything in order for the opening the next day. She never appeared to be in a hurry, though, and she was very verbal and easy to interview, without being feverish or speedy. In the midst of all the exciting things that happened to her she seemed cool and mellow and relaxed and concentrated, and, yes… lovely!

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Sophie, can you tell me what you’re up to right now, and what you’ve recently done?

The most recent thing I’ve done is my CD recording project in Upstate New York at C.I.M.P. Records; Creative Improvised Music Project, in Redwood, New York State. It’s a jazz company with a special recording technique, which amounts to utilizing no power amplification (PA) system, no reverb or other effects or anything. It’s simply live, raw…
The recordings are made inside a normal room, like a living room, with paintings on the wall and carpets on the floor, although there are sound engineers present. They don’t use any compression; in fact, they do nothing to alter the sound as it is. They always record like this. It’s their trademark, so to say. I believe they’ve been doing this since the 70s.

C.I.M.P. is part of a larger group called Cadence. They also publish a jazz magazine called Cadence Magazine. Cadence as such is more widely known. They record in a normal way, but C.I.M.P. is a different story. They are involved in the avant-garde and free jazz, which they mainly focus on, though my project may be seen as more commercial than the stuff they normally work with, which is very free and open. My music is not all that freewheeling. My pieces are more vividly arranged.

However, I enjoy bringing in other influences, and my music is not average standard jazz. I also play with what’s “in” and “out”, sort of. Something that is “in”… you know what I mean… if I have something that has a form and a rather strict arrangement, I enjoy setting sounds to it and veer off with the phrases I sing and create contrast between what’s in and what’s out. I stretch and flex.

This C.I.M.P. project wasn’t the project I had in mind for this kind of music. I originally planned to do it with a lot of voices and choirs and more sounds, but I couldn’t go ahead and do that, because they (C.I.M.P.) have everything acoustic, and further more, the man wouldn’t allow piano or drums. He wanted it more intimate, so I had to change the whole idea.

So he had the power of decision over everything?

No, these were the only things he wanted to change, that he didn’t want piano or keyboard, and those instruments weren’t even in place. He believed the guitar suited my voice better, and he didn’t want drums because he felt they’d drown me, in the concept he’d visualized; that they wouldn’t work with the recording techniques that they use. I had to adjust to that, to the situation. It meant that I re-worked my arrangements, which also affected my way of singing, naturally, pushing it in a more jazzy direction, because if I don’t have that much force and content in the arrangements – like I had before, when I recorded onto the computer – I stretch all the more vocally, and play more with the jazz thing, in a more comical manner.

Ok. How did the C.I.M.P. project start for you?

Well, what happened was that, ten years ago, I was in contact with this man at C.I.M.P., but at that stage he wasn’t fully convinced. Then, a few years ago, I was about to embark on this project, albeit with more sounds and all that. However, a lot of other things happened instead, and during all this I sent out a few demos.
My idea, originally, was that I would realize the project on my own, but a few obstacles in my life prevented me from hitting it off properly.
The C.I.M.P. man got attracted to one of these live demos that I had mailed out. Everybody knows, these days, that you have a financial advantage of realizing your own projects, if you have the means, since the recording companies don’t give you very good deals nowadays. On the other hand, it’s good publicity to be released on a label, resulting in more concerts and gigs. It helps you along, especially within the jazz scene. People do take you more seriously if your CD comes with an official label on it. It’s not that you make money from it directly, but you get more opportunities to perform; to be in concert. It may well lead to something else.

In this case I thought it was exciting to record with this ascetic technique. I could take advantage of it, in my way, sort of, instead of seeing it as an obstacle. I’m used to using reverbs and so forth. I’ve always liked that, because I’m so playful with my voice hither and thither, and this I couldn’t do at C.I.M.P. It was very bare and naked, so I had to extract the best from it in my way.
It was healthy, also, to get out into New York and meet those musicians and get new contacts.
I had percussion, guitar and bass in my band.

And the recordings you’ve just made, a couple of days ago in New York, will be released on a CD eventually?

Yes! Around April 2006. It will be channeled through North Country Distribution.

Is there a title to the record yet?

Mmh… The Rain in Spain… is what I want it to be! I have to discuss it with the company. I don’t know exactly what his influence on this is. The Rain in Spain is one of the songs on the CD, which I want for the title track. That song represents pretty much what I do, this somewhat theatrical, fairytaleish approach – with jazz and sounds.

Right after this recording project in New York, you’re about to exhibit your art – your paintings – at renowned Gummeson Gallery here in Stockholm, where you will also perform your songs. You fly in from New York and have an opening and concerts just a couple of days later! What is the reason for this artistic congestion in the middle of September 2005?

Well, the dates just happened like that, unintentionally. It’s good, though, musically, since I’ve just rehearsed the songs in New York and know how I want them.

How has the deal with the Gummeson Gallery materialized?

I just walked in to the gallery one and a half year ago, when I was out for a winter day’s walk along Strandvägen. I walked in, looked at the paintings in there, and sat down in an armchair and talked with the proprietor. There were two other artists present too. I didn’t plan anything, holy smoke, I’ve exhibited stuff at other places, but not in a real live gallery. I know that people tend to like my art, that it works, and I had a small copy of one of my paintings, which I used as a calling card. I gave that to the man, with my telephone number and so forth, and then he said: “Hey, by the way…” – he looked a little at it, and then he said: “You might wanna come here with a few more paintings and show me what you do”, sort of, and I thought: “Oops!”, Well, so I showed him a few works, sent him some stuff on the Internet, and he proposed something, about one and a half year ago, saying that we eventually could have some theme with music and paintings, and he wanted me to get something down on paper. I got a little story together, which is more complicated than what I actually will do at Gummeson’s. I called the plot Jack the Ripper. It dealt with all kinds of parallels to old men throughout history; mean men, simply, and I mixed this in art and music. It was very geared towards this, really, and he took a shine to it, but then nothing materialized anyway. I guess he worried that… I wasn’t well known as an artist, and in May he can get lots of people into the gallery – so nothing became of it then.

Later on I have sent him – Svenåke, the Gummeson proprietor - ideas and stuff, during the course of a year, and finally he caught on and gave me the dates, for music and paintings.
The opening is tomorrow – 15th September 2005 – and then I exhibit the paintings until Sunday 18th September. I have concerts at 7:30 PM on three nights, the 15th, 16th and 17th, Thursday, Friday and Saturday. [The concluding concert from Saturday 17th September is recorded by yours truly and reviewed elsewhere on this Sophie Dunér site]
I feel that the expression of the music, the songs, mirror the expression of the visual art works.

What did you venture into first, art wise? Music or painting?

I started out with painting, I think. I’ve been working both disciplines simultaneously, but I’m not trained as a painter like I am in music. I studied for four years at Berklee College of Music in Boston 1989 - 1993. I studied jazz; song and composition. I studied the piano in younger years, classical piano, for seven years, here in Sweden, on the West Coast where I lived. I am able to accompany myself.

During one period I turned in other directions than jazz. I felt, sometimes, that jazz sported a kind of macho concept in a kind of marathon performance practice. It didn’t have much of what I talked about just before the interview [at the rehearsal], about raindrops in The Rain in Spain, and trying out different sounds in Jack the Ripper to guide the feelings into… you know, you choose your chords and your sound to convey a message, which often is revealed in the text. It seems to me that people sometimes forget this. They just want to lay down a tune; breeze through it. I often try to explain things in another way. When you tell a story, it rubs off, it colors… you know, sometimes when musicians deliver solos, they do it technically sublime, but they do not tell a story. The music has no visual relation. I try to compose the arrangements in relation to the texts. It’s a bit more complex; that I note the colors, score the colors that I want. I’m an educated musician, so I can do this. An instrumentalist may be more knowledgeable in noting the colors, and sometimes musicians consider themselves more capable of choosing colors than I am. I can say, that in a cabaret song where I want certain colors, I cannot have fusion colors. The musicians must learn to also respect the singer, even if she isn’t, theoretically… or maybe she is, I don’t know, but the instrumentalists often have this attitude that the singer isn’t as initiated as they are, theoretically. However, she may know more about design than about the technical aspects. You have to learn how to convey the delicacy, and then they can equip this with technique, kind of, because this other side of the music is just as important, but is often obscured, or at least sometimes. I try to take the visual aspect and put it into the music, so that people actually think about raindrops when… ‘cause there’s so much you can emit there. It has come to a point now when I score everything in my songs, I note arrangements, so I need people who work both jazz and classical music – and pop! They must be able to play an arrangement, as opposed to play just freely. I need all these skills in my collaborators.

What happened after your four years at Berklee College of Music in Boston?

I stayed on in Boston for one year. Then I went to New York for six months. I worked in a restaurant there and had a few gigs too. After that I decided to go to Spain. In Spain I began working as a song teacher, while also playing with a band with various members. I lived in Spain for eight years. I was also involved in a project with a contemporary composer and musician. He was Spanish, but lived in Holland at that time, only to move to Puerto Rico later. I participated as a mezzo-soprano in his works. I even joined him in Puerto Rico for a while, but we also collaborated in Spain, and I toured with his ensemble. In that context I participated as a classical singer, in a contemporary setting, without the strictness and rigidity of, for example, Stockhausen. I could use my voice in a freer kind of way, sort of.
I was also involved with a big band in Switzerland, with which I worked. We did a recording, and also toured Switzerland. I also worked as a composer there, in addition to singing.