Thread Of Life
(ACT 9025-2)

The E.S.T. drummer left it a lot longer after the sudden death of pianist Esbjorn Svensson than his bassist colleague Dan Berglund, before bringing out some music under his own name.

I get the impression there was a time when Ostrom, who had been playing with Svensson since they were teenagers, thought seriously about doing something else entirely. Thankfully for us, he has stayed behind the drumkit, making his marvellous slowly developing, grandly arcing grooves that gave those E.S.T. favourites their fresh and original structures.

Attention will naturally centre here upon the track Ballad For E, which Ostrom and Berglund laid down in the Avatar Studios in New York with Pat Metheny. It’s a beautiful tribute to Esbjorn, and gains the accretion not only of the players’ memories of Svensson, but the listener’s memories too.

Having said all that, it’s not quite as interesting, I don’t think, as the rest of this album, which features the drummer with Andreas Hourdakis on guitars, Thobias Gabrielson on electric bass and Gustaf Karlof on piano and keyboards. Ostrom quite rightly takes the attention off the piano for the most part, using more electric and electronic sounds.

The publicity blurb refers to this band sounding like a rock band playing jazz, as opposed to E.S.T. sounding like a pop group playing jazz. I’m not sure the comparison is quite accurate, but you get the gist.

Certainly the guitar, the song structures and the general feel are rockier, and Ostrom deserves a wide and vast audience for what is very accessible and attractive music

After a short impressionistic Prelude introduced by chimes and deep electronic drum sounds, we are into Piano Break Song, which starts with the kind of cut-up repeat riff  Nik Bartsch favours, with Ostrom’s familiar urgent brush style there to reassure us all and remind us how happy we are to have him back. What opens this track out and indicates a broader musical palette is on offer here is that after nearly four and a half minutes of twitchy minimalism and a scorching guitar solo, there is a sudden swell of synths out into a more generous chord pattern and something of a resolution.

Longing is a dark-toned and spacy groove with flashes of brightness from steel pan (or, more likely, a steel pan sound from the keyboards); Afilia Mi opens with fast handclap and prog-rock stabs, rising to a long-legged melody with wordless vocals; Weight Of Death has a funereal organ opening (one can almost see the coffin coming down the aisle) but then Frisellian guitar introduces a simply gorgeous and deeply sad melody. Here, it seems, really is in music the loss Magnus Ostrom felt after the death of his closest friend and the man with whom he had shared all those stages, all those dressing rooms, all those bus rides, all those rehearsals, all those sound checks, all those flights.

Things get really stretched out (in a good way) by the time we get to the two parts of Hymn (For The Past). There is here the simplicity of Josh Haden’s Spiritual, a melody with the kind of folk timelessness that means it can be played over and over and over without every losing its power. The subtle building of intensity and the widening of the imaginary space of the music is something Magnus Ostrom has always been a master of, and it’s just great to have him doing it again.

This band is already touring in Europe, so keep a look out for dates here, perhaps in the autumn. They should be something special.