I met Stefan Jerling the first time in the Lapland mountains of Sweden – at the mountain hut Tjäktja – in September 2005. He startled me with his very light load; just 8 kilos – which is why I immediately gave him a new name: Acht-Kilo Stefan, which is German for Eight-Kilo Stefan. Most of the hikers in Lapland in September were German-speaking, so I thought it fitting to use a German name. You can read more about that hike at my Kebnekaise 2005 site.

In spite of his light way of hiking, Stefan managed to slip in a clarinet with the other few belongings he brought to Lapland! He played it all over the trail, but I especially recall a night in the doggy hut at the Sälka mountain station, when Stefan gave a wildly appreciated concert.

Stefan told me the story of how his playing once saved the life of a forlorn and ill-prepared family just under the summit of Sweden’s tallest peak – Kebnekaise – a few years ago. The family had climbed the Eastern Trail – which is dangerous because of crevasses and cracks in the Björling Glacier, which you must traverse, and a steep climb of a few hundred meters, where you usually need guides to ascend safely, if you’re not a trained mountaineer.
Anyway, this time, just when the family was in the process of ambling up the last piece of ice – the glacier summit – of Kebnekaise, dense mist formed, and they were completely lost. They didn’t have food, and no warm clothes. They would have perished, wasn’t it for Stefan Jerling and his clarinet. Stefan didn’t know about the lost family. He was just standing around below the summit in the mist, playing his clarinet. The family heard him, and though they must have thought they were hallucinating, or entering the Beyond, they went towards the music. Stefan then was able to assist the family to safety.

In June 2006 Stefan Jerling has been biking on a bicycle from his home in Malmoe, Southern Sweden, up towards Stockholm, playing at jazz festivals and other small events, sleeping in hostels along the way, minding his company Jazzmakers through the web. (That company is now obsolete). He played, for example, at a jazz event in Askersund, and then biked on to see a woman he just met on the Internet, a headmaster of a Stockholm school for autistic children. She had a summerhouse south of Norrköping, and Stefan spent Midsummer (a holy, pagan time in Sweden!) with her there. When he set out to bike to visit me in Nyköping (Skitköping: Shitville!) it started to rain, so his new female friend drove him and his bike here in a pick-up.

The day after – after I got back home from my criminal investigations – he played some tunes, which I recorded. I edited the stuff – mainly just excising the songs, fading in and out, and then committed the music to CD. The CD turned out very nicely. I wasn’t aware of Stefan as a guitarist and singer; only as a clarinetist, but he turned out to be a very skilled and original interpreter of Carl Michael Bellman and Nils Ferlin; two Swedish national emblems, the earlier from the 1700s and the latter from the first half of the 20th century.

Stefan Jerling sings some of their songs on this CD in his original, strong and penetrating voice, accompanying himself on his guitar – which he carries on his back when biking through Sweden. He then switches to his clarinet halfway, and plays improvisations as well as classics as Stranger On the Shore. The CD ends with a discussion or plainly a conversation between him and me. It’s a very much improvised but very much alive and enjoyable CD, cut on 27th June 2006 in my apartment in Shitville.

The day after, Stefan mounted his bike, guitar on his back, heading through the forests towards the town of Gnesta, to catch the commuter train into Stockholm to get together with his woman, the headmaster Ann-Mari, and also to play at a funeral a day later.

Stefan Jerling is a free thinker and surely a free liver of his life; plain and genial!