Mourning has broken
An invisibility cloak seems to have been thrown over Nils Berg’s Paid to Cry since release by Hoob in March. That, of course, says nothing about its quality.
On the agenda is saxophonist Berg’s 2024 Composer in Residence stint with the Norrbotten Big Band. It was a fertile spell that yielded eight “deathless” pieces. I am not being funny. Berg’s concept is not raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens. Mourning is instead one of his favourite things.
Grim, eh. Not so fast buster. Because it’s not.
Minor key moods and “blueness” are the stuff of jazz after all. It’s in the DNA. And there’s plenty of tenderness say on ‘Jag skulle bara hem’ – no me neither. Friendly AI chatbot know it all Claude – crazy how I am already anthropomorphising the AI as if it’s Tiddles – says it means: “I was just going home.”
Home in what sense I muse idly. Going home to glory in the gospel sense? Let’s hope. But the Swedish blues are stark, fairly repressed, and a lot more infused by the starchy evangelicalism of local Lutheranism however secularised. As a clue look to what issuing label Hoob says instead – a name that sounds ridiculous in English, don’t you think. Paid To Cry you see “draws on the figure of the hired mourner as a musical archetype.” Another digression before getting to the heart of the matter.
Berg is from Gothenburg. He looks to the ancient highways of warmer climes long ago and far away. “In ancient Greece and Rome,” he says, “there was a profession called the mourner. Wealthy people would hire professional mourners to, for example, organise the grieving, or simply amplify it. Now me, Jocke (Joakim Milder) and all the musicians in the big band will be those mourners.”
I love to cry and wish I could do it more often. I think a good cry can lead to an ecstatic and tender feeling. The great thing about having musicians as mourners is that it can lead to exactly that – an ecstatic musical moment.”
Nils Berg
All fine and dandy. A mock funeral of an album? Perhaps. There isn’t a New Orleans second line theme to it which would have been one good angle. But luckily Berg, 48, his slap happy sax playing is characterful and not at all boring, succeeds in this aspiration of lancing the boil of his blues.
He’s not a scrape your nails down the blackboard type of jazzer at all. There is an inner nifty fifties aspect to his musical mindset if you listen hard enough and the big band arrangements are quite 1950s-ish although that isn’t obvious at first blush.
Previous albums of Berg’s span several projects and collaborators. With his primary band Nils Berg Cinemascope, formed in 2008, he released a string of records on Hoob including Vocals (2013), Popmotion, Searching for Amazing Talent from Punjab, Basilicata Dreaming, We Seem to Be Drifting Apart and Seven Colors of the Universe.
His earlier quartet The Stoner, great name, produced several albums, among them bingo another super title Hat Music (2009), recorded in a small Czech village, with the band also touring Finland, Syria, Germany and South Africa.
More recently, Coming and Going (2023) appeared as a solo “ambient instrumental” jazz set but don’t hold that against it. Sorry this review is starting to sound like a Hans Groiner TED talk.
Beyond his own recordings, Berg has collaborated widely with Mando Diao, Håkan Hellström’s band, the Matti Bye Ensemble and musicians in Cape Town, alongside theatre and film projects.
Paid To Cry lands in our pick of the top Euro Jazz (and separately Big Band) recordings for 2026 so far – read the full Euro list, below.
