Mourning has broken
There’s no notion of a Samuel Beckett or Yusuf like Cat or indeed astrophe to this. Puns ‘R’ us. But an invisibility cloak seems to have been thrown over Paid to Cry since release in March. That, of course, says nothing about its quality.
On the agenda is saxophonist Nils 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. But call it kind of black as 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.
Weirdly it isn’t gloomy at all. I often find gloomy stuff makes good tunes – case in point Rezső Seress’ ‘Hungarian Suicide Song’ aka the magnificent ‘Gloomy Sunday’ – a bit of a worry to the Carpathian authorities at one stage as a height of anxiety even before the era of multi storey car parks.
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. Without any thought of needling you dear reader but if still unconvinced especially if you are a member of the toe tapping community ponder this. Down the Dog. Perhaps you are inspecting your tankard after sucking up to the Man all day long during a hard day’s epic shift doing pointless but mercifully remunerated tasks possibly decked out in a none too paunch flattering gilet jaune waiting for the next hi vis Simon Spillett record to brighten your day before heading home to Osidge humming “round like a circle in a spiral. like a wheel within a wheel” as you strap hang on the bus trundling blandly through the north London suburbs once again.
To understand Berg’s admirably quixotic windmills of your mind method you have to forget about Tubby Hayes for a minute, mate.
He’s not a scrape your nails down the blackboard type of jazzer at all Tubbyologists may be relieved to know. 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 ‘murican spelling, guv if tssking, apols. As Shaggy and of course Rik Rok sang it, “it wasn’t me“.]
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.
A duo record, with not an exactly trip off the tongue lightly title, sounds a bit rude even, Gubbstol 1937, was made with Mikael Augustsson. 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.
