It’s to the advantage of CIMP that they’ve made this CD long enough for you to really get into the groove. The booklet carries Sophie Dunér’s lyrics, which I appreciate, though they should have been better proofread. I shouldn’t forget Kara D. Rusch’s cover art either. She does all the cover art for the company, so even if the CDs look very different from each other, they have something very poetic and generously colorful and very expressive about them. This cover art for Sophie Dunér’s CD is attractive and inspiring. Sophie Dunér is a visual artist herself; a painter with her very own style, so I though she might get to do her own cover art, but Kara D. Rusch’s painting showing here is quite up to it, and very nice indeed, fitting the spirit of Dunér’s music and lyrics too.

This set of songs is very well recorded, keeping the original live sound unblemished, bringing vocalist Sophie Dunér to you in an almost ghostly presence. (But this praise does not encompass all the recordings. I have serious objections too, which you will read about later) The instruments are likewise superbly recorded – and no reverberation or other electronic enhancement is used anywhere, and no editing!

It is probably very unusual these days for a group of musicians to do a recording under these demanding circumstances, but Sophie Dunér, Rory Stuart, Matt Penman and Kahlil Kwame Bell did it.

The one who puts these purist demands on the performers is head of the label CIMP: Robert D. Rusch, who has found his special niche in contemporary music with his ideas of how recordings should be done – even though his son Marc D. Rusch is the recording engineer.

However, his ideas have taken him way too far off the main course this time, when he decided to treat Sophie Dunér, the vocalist, as merely one instrument in the quartet, letting her voice appear at left, and not centered, which would be expected.

He says, in the CD booklet:

Outrageous!!! Couldn’t he have kept that freshness and natural sound of performance if Sophie had been placed in the middle, right in front of the two microphones? When do you see the vocalist stand way over at left in a concert on stage? Never! Of course she stands dead center! This is just foolish! I don’t know if Robert or Marc made a mistake when recording, and then couldn’t change it, or what, but this purist shit talk that the producer presents above is just that: gibberish.

This placement of the vocalist destroys the listening, not because we’re “raised on electronically centered monophonic vocal recordings”, but because it is the most natural thing in the world to have the singer, who also delivers a story, a message, right in the middle. You don’t have less regard for the instrumentalists because they are spread from left to right around the vocalist, not at all. This is really a lunatic endeavor.

Then Marc D. Rusch comments on the noise from gushes of air hitting the microphones. This does not happen much in the song indicated in Marc’s text, i.e. no. 9, but in another song, no. 5, though it isn’t so disturbing, keeping in beat and sounding like a bass drum being hit. Rusch says he didn’t want to use a pop screen because it sounds like the singer sings behind a screen then. More garbage talk, indeed! And if he really feels that way, he could still have made an exception for that one song where there are a lot of so-called plosives. This man has no excuses for his wayward purism, but he tries to persuade us into believing he has a philosophy that must be followed, although it’s disastrous. In this recording of Sophie Dunér his purism has taken Rusch into untraveled heights of foolishness.

I feel sorry for Sophie Dunér, who really does deliver here, in wonderful vocals through fantastic phrasings. Furthermore, she wrote much of the material herself. Luckily, there are other CDs out with her, which have not been destroyed by some funky purist with awkward and unrealistic bearings, like Jürg Wickihalder directing The Interplay Collective featuring Sophie Dunér (1997) and the great CD The Sophie Dunér Orchestra from Berklee College of Music (1994). I also have a demo CD I made myself at a gallery in Stockholm.

Now, I like Sophie Dunér enough to make an extra effort, so I made a makeshift remix of this CIMP CD, with Sophie ending up dead center. Unfortunately, since the source material is the way it is, it is hard to do anything very good with it, so the remix sounds more like a mono recording, but at least I’m able to listen now, without getting angry…

Purists often get lost way in their less and less realistic ideas, which might be interesting to read about in some specialist audio review, but which will cause harm out there on a record, such as has been the case here. The only decent thing for CIMP to do, would have been to issue a conventional (only regarding placement: the rest, most of it, I can buy!) version, plus this awkward Bob Rusch strangeland version. Then they’d see how many would buy this wretched version: not many!

I’ve run into straying purists before, like in the case of Nimbus Records. I couldn’t stand their strange echoing sound, with, for example the piano sounding distant and unclear. When I told them this, they said they were simply using the recording hall reverberation to make it more “natural”. To hell with that! I don’t want their hall reverberating in my room. I want the piano closely miked, to let it reverberate in MY room! That’s the reverberation I want. It’s crazy to think that the recording hall reverberation should reverberate in MY room!

Some of Bob Rusch’s ideas are good, for example his choice of artists for his releases – and also the recording technique of no extra reverberation or later editing. I like this. It’s just that this time he’s fucked up badly, and destroyed an important recording for one of the artists I really like the most. That is outrageous and unforgivable. It’s lousy work, Bob – wrong decisions.

I fully understand Bob’s desire to go out of his way to make something out of the ordinary – but sometimes the best thing a man can do is to do the ordinary… This time he would have scored heavily, had he stayed on track. Now he is badly derailed.
It’s a real nuisance to read Marc D. Rusch’s “recording engineer’s notes”. They mostly consist of his excuses to the listener for this and that; for plosives because he didn’t want to use a pop screen, and for the off placement of the natural born centerpiece: Sophie. If he and boss Bob had done it by the book in the first place, there’d been no reason for excuses, and Marc could have used his page of excuses for something more interesting. Man, these guys Upstate New York are in bad need of fresh air and influences from other people than themselves. I’ve experienced the same sickening clan feeling down at Stockhausen’s courses in Kuerten, Germany, with all its heavy inbreeding.

Now lets hear Sophie anyway, and I’ll listen to my makeshift remix, not to get to angry – having already stored away the original CIMP record, never to give it a spin again.

Track 1. The Rain in Spain.

Sophie Dunér starts out with one of her own compositions; the title track.
Many of Sophie’s songs are ambiguous, complicated – offering no simple solutions, which is why they fall like echoes of axes through life, illuminating the precise moment of incision; that precious moment that fractures that which no longer is fit to stay solid, or solidifies that which has been dispersed, like a gang of jackdaws settling in their night tree. This is the case with The Rain in Spain. This take of the song is unusually calm, soothing, compared to the recording of it I made in a Stockholm Gallery on 17 September, just about a week after she recorded for CIMP. Sophie’s voice is so close, like she’s whispering in your ear, except she’s not whispering. She’s riding her voice like seagulls the winds on the ocean: freshly, swaying, ascending and descending, closing in and distancing itself, in purity and cleanliness, somehow: salty soul music. Sophie’s years in the States guarantee a perfect pronunciation too, that really licks your ears…

Rory Stuart is alone at the outset with his guitar, but after Sophie has sung for a while, through the gearing up of the musical engine, Matt Penman on bass and Kahlil Kwame Bell on percussion join in, and the locomotive moves down the line, inertia keeping it on the move; a heavy weight sliding effortlessly through the landscape. The musicians get ample time for purely instrumental progressions, and when Sophie flies her hair and raises her beautiful voice with a smidgen of that candy bar hoarseness, things are sort of complete, and all you have to do is soar along. Blessed voice! Blessed music! A masterpiece.

Track 2. The Multiple Useful.

Another of Sophie Dunér’s own compositions, lyrics and all, is The Multiple Useful. This song is somewhat venomous and equivocal; a characteristic Dunér coloring and shading, often applied to the ever-changing cloudscape of male-female relations and the constant interplay of power between the sexes, delivered in humor and sparkling self-irony:

The catchy tune begins in Kwame Bell’s percussion, bouncing and sagging, sliding and thumping, until, bell-like and soap-bubbly – and sandpapery a millimeter below the surface – Sophie’s voice kicks in with vibrating energy caught in all it’s 100% liveliness by the two microphones in Bob Rusch’s Spirit Room on the family compound Upstate New York.

This tune makes good use of sudden stops and pauses that holds your breath while inertia is building up heavily, released at the very exact moment, in perfect timing which must be incredibly hard to achieve in this live situation recording, but apparently Sophie and the musicians know each other well enough to deliver this stop-and-go method its present brilliance.

Sophie’s voice pries the situation open, extends it on all sides, swells like an ocean swell, describes the environment with a semi-circular movement of her arm, heard in her voice. She climbs to sudden pitch-heights and growls like an unforeseen Björk before – after a sudden stop – descending with power of gravity into forceful roller coaster curves of audio!

And then it all comes to a sudden end, the vocal treading stopping in the middle of a step, one foot raised!

Track 3. At Last

Here is the first tune that isn’t a Dunér original. It’s the old standard At Last. I have another Sophie Dunér rendering of this piece, on that makeshift demo CD from the Stockholm Gummeson Gallery, recorded about a week after this CIMP recording. This is what I enthusiastically wrote about that version:

“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, 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!”

As I compare the two recordings, I find they’re really different, the way two different takes from two different locations should be. There is no reverberation in the CIMP recording, but the voice is close and intimate. The Gummeson recording, on the other hand, has the natural room reverberation intact (rock walls), and Sophie’s voice is even more sensual than on the CIMP CD. The contrabass playing is heavier and more accentuated on my own recording – and did I have to choose (which I luckily don’t have to…), I’d chose the Gummeson version, which, I believe, is better sung and better played, elevating the classic song to untraveled heights of performance and execution. The room reverberation allows Sophie’s voice to really reach into your center of delight on the Stockholm recording, whereas the CIMP recording has a dry closeness of anatomy that the Gummeson recording lacks. The contrabass on CIMP sounds as if recorded in a bucket, in contrast with the free flowing of the Gummeson CD contrabass, which really encompasses you in might and strength and a swaggering, swaying, thumping rhythm.

Track 4. Two Time Losers.

Another Dunér original! It’s a rough, clear-sighted story about male-female again, and the impossibility of trying to live up to the standards of matrimony: luckless humans trying to conform, trying to adhere, trying the formulas of married life, crackled from the outset. Tough story from Sophie about being fooled by tradition and your own mainstream expectations.

She chisels the melody as with a sculptor’s tool, piling line upon line of evidence that point to an unhappy state of make-believe togetherness.
All the musicians do a great job on this bit, especially guitarist Rory Stuart, who excels in rambling, spinning solos and limping, stuttering phrasings that excite the music marvelously.

A comparison with the Gummeson CD version may also be made in this case. The band is a little untogether on the Gummeson version of the song (keyboard and contrabass duo), but an advantage on the Stockholm version is the wicked, slightly out of tune keyboard solo midway, which, humorously, illustrates the disparate forces that pull in different directions within a relationship built on expectations instilled in you by society and tradition and your own cowardice. That was a genial inclusion in the Gummeson Gallery version – but otherwise the CIMP one is the overall better version in this case.

Track 5. Up Again

Up Again is one of my all-time Sophie Dunér favorites. It really kicks ass! I have a Gummeson version of this highlight too, so I’ll compare the two. CIMP’s version begins with a rather elaborate percussion solo, which eventually, with an over-explicit musical gesture lets the others in. I rather prefer the Gummeson solution with a driving Hammond organ, which really fits the pushy text line, wherein the words swing like the soul of jazz itself! For sure this is a Dunér hit song – but it hasn’t received its final recording yet, as I see it. The voice is clearer and louder on the Gummeson version. Vocals are much too low on CIMP’s version, taking away most of the power of the song. The percussion is overstated and somewhat out-of-place, as if someone decided to give the percussionist some extra space to make him feel good or something; a misplaced favor. No, this nasty hit song, that I really love, is badly recorded by CIMP. The song gets lost in the process, which is really bad, since it might be Sophie’s best song ever. The plosives that the recording engineer of CIMP asks forgiveness for on another track, are pretty bad on this track, but since they come in beat with the song, you can stand them. Would have been easy, though, to use a pop filter on this one track. What I can’t stand, however, is the sloppy way CIMP let the possibilities of this great hit slip out of their hands. This is simply unprofessional in my ears.

Track 6. Marionettes.

This s another powerful Dunér composition, which, however, is completely misunderstood by Bob Rusch and his sound engineer. Sophie’s voice is kept too low, in comparison to, especially, the guitar. Even so, it is great to hear Sophie’s extended scat singing midway. This meandering, rocky vocal show-off is longer and much better here on the CIMP CD than on the Gummeson CD, even though some other qualities – some frantic keyboard adventures dancing tight with Sophie’s voice and then in soloist funkhouse candybar progressions - are soaring highlights on the Gummeson recording.
Rory Stuart’s guitar solo on the CIMP version is very ingenious too; brilliant. Yeah, had only Sophie’s voice been turned up substantially (and, of course, centered!), this would have been a CIMP hit! The timing is perfect throughout, too, between the singer and the musicians, to a fraction of a fraction of a second, amazing me when I think of the fact that the recording is live!

Track 7. Caravan.

Another jazz standard, treated by Sophie Dunér: Caravan – beginning with percussion and bass. The guitar joins a little later. Not much is to be said about this entry, except that it is very well played – and especially sung! – though I think the vocals should have been a little louder.
Sophie breaks out into a form of wordless singing that reminds me of Alice Babs in the 1950s or Nordic cattle call singing; ornamented, high-pitch calls cast across the valleys between the forested hills of the summer graze lands, from female shepherd to female shepherd, or to the cattle.

Track 8. Jack the Ripper.

This is another of Sophie’s sure hits! When I hear it I recall the painting by Sophie by the same name, which I saw on display at Gummeson’s Gallery in Stockholm – and Sophie Dunér’s painting and composing oftentimes are two expressions of the same creative force, surely amplifying each other when displayed simultaneously.

Again, this song deals with the eternal problems of the merging and yielding of inter-sexual relations: futile tries at mixing oil and water, spun in Sophie’s rare and delicate black humor of expression.
Quite a few of Sophie Dunér’s songs aren’t just mainstream jazz- or cabaret songs, but tend to make their way into a definite hit song realm, leaving the shelter or prison of a branded jazz idiom, meaning that they have the potential of becoming as well-known as, for example, Don’t Cry For Me, Argentina or Yesterday – and this is one of those extremely powerful songs: powerful in the writing, powerful in the melody, and powerful in the phrasing: Masterly!
If fate isn’t a real bastard, many of Sophie Dunér’s compositions will be not only jazz standards, but standards of that genre-free realm of popular success where you find Strangers in the Night and The Way to Amarillo and Just Like A Woman.

The CIMP version on this CD isn’t bad; quite acceptable, but the definite recording of the song isn’t yet laid down. The funky version recorded at Gummeson Gallery is perhaps more forceful than the CIMP one, but both are good in their own way. The keyboard playing on the Gummeson CD, sometimes in a piano voice, sometimes in a fuzzbox kind of manner, and at one time in an exploding, glaring synthesizer solo show-off, paired with the thumping, ricketing slap bass playing on the contrabass and Sophie’s very special joyous voice reaching for the sky in that recording, places the Gummeson recording of the song in a class slightly higher than the CIMP effort, though.

Track 9. Lush Life

The Billy Strayhorn classic Lush Life is by far the longest track on the CD with its eight and a half minute’s duration. Sophie delivers in a talk-singing kind of way at the outset, soon blooming into bar room America sentiments that are… lush! This is a smoky melody, a smoky song, laid-back but yet intense in it’s slightly depraved posture, slowly but surely finding its identity as it leisurely strolls along, and you can’t help but feeling some sort of sympathy for an age – a period and a time, now gone but not quite forgotten, as we watch old black and white movies on DVD; Bogart and Becall. For a Swedish singer like Sophie Dunér to express this sonic milieu without a trace of cultural or linguistic estrangement is a grand achievement in itself – but to do it with this sincere and quite natural beauty is wondrous! Thanks to the musicians too, caressing the vocalist in silk and satin, in velvet and a dark shade of blue! Great all along, all through! Perhaps this is the highlight of the CIMP CD, after all, everything taken into account (because much of Sophie’s own fantastic material is badly recorded on CIMP, with regard to the balance between instruments and voice, and of course also entirely destroyed by the placement of the vocals spatially).

Track 10. The Fight.

This is a Dunér original that I hear for the first time here. It seems more of a jazzy pop song to me than anything else, strangely enough in the manner of a singer like Essra Mohawk, as she sounded in the folksy part of the 1970s! It’s a simple but sincere song that could have been recorded differently, perhaps, but then there are always choices to make. I kind of hear this song in a different, more rewarding instrumental setting. As I listen again, the song grows on me, due, in large, to the great vocals and the vocalist’s expertise phrasing: a Dunér miniature with sure domiciliary rights in this collection of songs.

Track 11. Mack the Knife.

A standard of standards voiced by Sophie Dunér. It’s brave to engage in such a song, which could bore many if nothing new was shown. Sophie’s arrangement, though, in it’s swaggering, humping motion, with Rory Stuart’s talk-back words in the background, renders the worn down song a pleasurable and fresh shading that keeps you listening with interest. Quite an accomplishment!

Track 12. Lonely Woman.

A standard yet, but unfamiliar to me, which is why I have no traditional load to weigh me down as I listen to Sophie.
A lyrical guitar beginning carefully opens the space for Sophie’s voice, coming at you close and cozy, vibrant, almost erotic, high up in the registers in tenderly dispersed vocal sound posts all along the perimeter, slowly constructing the most amazing structure of semi-transparency, a sonic framework through the molded beauty of a voice in total control and unsurpassed beauty: listen through earphones, and you will fall in love! I’ve never heard Sophie sing quite like this. She blows me away here; it simply cannot be done better! I sit here, late night Sweden, in my shorts, earphones strapped across my head, in front of the Macintosh – and I do fall in love! What a voice, such phrasing, such modulation – what an artist she is!

Track 13. A Midsummernights Dream.

This is a song that simply over-powered me with bliss and pleasure when Sophie sang it at Gummeson Gallery in Stockholm on 17th September 2005. It’s a song of her own making, and one of those hit melodies again! However, how can you spell it like that? Shouldn’t it be A Midsummer Night’s Dream? Well, it hardly matters. The song is a success!

Funny though, when I read the text, it doesn’t grab me at all. It is, in fact, lousy writing! This all disappears in the magic of the melody, though, and in the vocal beatitude of Sophie’s voice, and we have an eternal ballad on hand!

Listening is like riding a cozy British armchair, balloon-like, across the dark and mysterious forests of Sweden in a Lars Gullin or Jan Johansson or Monica Zetterlund atmosphere, the meadows gleaming with the semi-alien intelligence of down-to-earth and beloved goblins of Nordic mythology and folklore; elves and fairies and all the little ones, helpers and pinching avengers.
Kahil Kwame Bell’s percussion – especially those tingling hypnotizers! – amplify this late night, light night Midsummer magic.
The version on the Gummeson CD is slower, with piano and bass accompaniment, and the voice is of course reverberated by the stonewalls of the gallery. On comparison, the Gummeson take outshines the CIMP one, also concerning the lyricism and dreamy property of Sophie’s voice. The sole drawback is a missed line at one place. Sophie’s talk-singing to herself during part of the piano solo adds to the absentminded and introverted atmosphere of this dream; adds hypnotic nosetip tickling and a soaring sense of erotic out-of-body experiences.
The CIMP recording of this Nordic blues is too controlled and withheld, and the lack of reverberation, which I like much of the time – for a change, kind of – doesn’t work at all in this dreamy soundscape. There’s a contraindication at work in there. Sophie doesn’t really deliver as well as she can on this take either, which her still passion on the Gummeson recording a week later amply shows.

Track 14. Paris Blues.

Sophie Dunér ends her CIMP CD with Paris Blues; an Ellington bit which she takes and molds in her own personal way, her voice tight and close. Rory Stuart’s guitar – bringing up memories of Les Paul – amplifies the blues property fine, and Matt Penman tags along, providing a fine structure and a lattice work of vibrating dark forces, while Kahlil Kwame Bell slaps his bongos in munchy finger-soldier marches and sudden attacks that liven and strengthen the atmosphere.

In a choice few of these songs above Sophie Dunér really is justified, displayed in all her marvelous colorings and nuances, but most of the time she is let down, either by a wicked balance of volume, or by not taking the time to get a perfect take. I have compared the CIMP CD recordings that I also have on the Gummeson Gallery demo CD with each other, and in all instances but one, the simply achieved Gummeson recordings are very much superior. This is a scandalous fact, downgrading my confidence in Bob Rusch and CIMP heavily. I have a few CDs by CIMP, though, that really are good, so I don’t know what to make of this failure – because it is a serious failure.

Please also keep in mind that I have used my own makeshift remix of the CIMP CD, where Sophie’s voice is placed dead center. The original CIMP CD is, to me, completely unlistenable, because of this crazy idea of putting the centerpiece – Sophie – out left.

When it comes to Sophie’s achievements, though, in spite of the recording company that she was unfortunate to record for, they are marvelous. Her texts are – most of the time – fascinating, head-on, humorous, venomous, intelligent, funny and with that dark, serious strike that raises them out of the present, to a common ground without genres or brands, where the songs live their own life and stand their ground. Her melodies are almost all of the time plain hit material, and her singing, not least, is wonderful, brilliant, sexy and melancholy – and her phrasing is out of this world!

10 points to Sophie, 1 weak point to CIMP!