"WITH a name like yours, you could be any shape, almost …" The currently Hollywood-hyped Alice's remark to Humpty Dumpty in Through the Looking Glass springs to mind when considering Tonbruket – Dan Berglund's Tonbruket, to be precise.
Berglund is the Swedish bassist whose distorted, rock-inflected arco bass tones gave a distinctive edge to the late lamented EST – the Esbjörn Svensson Trio – whose inspired fusion of piano jazz, classical and rock ingredients excited audiences well
beyond mainstream jazz.
Tonbruket – which can be loosely translated as "sound workshop" – is the band he formed following the untimely death of pianist Svensson in a scuba diving accident in June 2008, and it kicks off a UK tour in Edinburgh's Queen's Hall this Saturday.
Aficionados anticipating an EST sound-alike outfit may be disappointed to find nothing in common with the Svensson band – except for that yelling arco bass tone and a similarly genre-defying approach.
For the 46-year-old bassist has assembled an idiosyncratic quartet which straddles elements of European jazz, rock, country music and much else. If not quite any shape, it does indeed encompass many sounds, including, apart from Berglund's bass, such disparate instrumental forces as pedal steel guitar, pump organ and accordion, as well as purposefully deployed electric guitar and drums.
And if it is the rock elements that tend to catch the ear on the band's newly released and eponymous album, this shouldn't really come as any surprise. Following the appallingly sudden demise of the Svensson trio, Berglund, struggling to pick up the threads of his musical career, looked to his roots, which lay in rock rather than in jazz, with youthful heroes including Deep Purple and Black Sabbath – as anyone listening to one of his sizzling, screeching bass breaks during an EST gig might have gathered.
He rejoined one of his old associates from the Per Texas Johansson band, with whom he had played before his EST days – guitarist and pedal steel player Johan Lindström – as well as pianist Martin Hederos of the Swedish psychedelic pop band Soundtrack of Our Lives, who also throws pump organ, violin and accordion into the mix, and drummer Andreas Werliin.
"We really liked the sound of it," Berglund says of the new band's choice of name, "and then, our tiny four-man factory also researches and produces. We produce tones that together hopefully result in good music."
Some jazz purists may choose to differ, balking understandably at the intriguing if unpredictable diorama of soundscapes which is the Tonbruket album, but while there may be an apparent lack of direction, there is also a sense of Berglund re-immersing himself in past enthusiasms.
Thus, the album's track Sister Sad slides in with a country-ish pedal steel whine and shimmering chimes that work themselves into a guitar-thrashing climax. Elsewhere, Sailor Waltz is a more shadowy creation, Berglund's bowed bass singing wryly over gentle piano that seems intent on evolving into an African marimba, while Monstrous Colossus is something of a riff juggernaut.
There is a distinct cinematic quality to much of the album, and the only evident nod to Berglund's EST credentials is the Song For E, with its eloquent plucked bass and meditative piano over a mission-hall organ and metronomic drum pulse.
It resolutely defies pigeon-holing, and how it will all pan out live remains to be heard at the Queen's Hall on Saturday. As Berglund recently told an interviewer: "EST is part of my history; it influences my music making and composing right now. I was in it, it was in me and it will always be with me – just like my hard-rock history has always been part of me."
• Dan Berglund's Tonbruket album is out now on Act Music. The group plays the Queen's Hall, Edinburgh, on Saturday. For further details see www.tonbruket.com
