According to a recent news release, ACT Music announces the release of 301, a full album of previously unheard material by e.s.t. (Esbjörn Svensson Trio), available on May 8. The album is a follow up to e.s.t.‘s 2008 effort, Leucocyte, and is the group’s second album following pianist Esbjörn Svensson‘s tragic death (prior to Leucocyte‘s release). Heralded as one of the most exciting jazz bands of the decade, the seven-track album features Svensson with his longtime band mates, drummer Magnus Öström and bassist Dan Berglund.
In January 2007, e.s.t. was on tour in Asia and Australia performing shows in Tokyo, Osaka, Yokohama, Jakarta, Perth and Sydney. It was their third tour of Japan and their second time on the continent; and the venues and audiences had become noticeably bigger. Only a few weeks before, they had finished their triumphant tour of Germany, including a legendary performance in Hamberg which resulted in Live in Hamburg (ACT, 2007), awarded “Album of the Decade” by the London Times. It was undoubtedly the prime time for the style-defining jazz band of the 2000s.
The group decided to rent the famous “Studio 301” in Sydney for their off-days in the middle of the Australian tour and jammed for two consecutive days to develop new songs and material. Altogether, they recorded nine hours of music. Leucocyte became the first release from these sessions and has been praised by critics and fans alike as a ground-breaking work that leads into a new musical universe. Very soon after the recording, Svensson had edited much of the material down to two albums. And so the plan at the time was to release either a double album or two consecutive albums from this recording. Svensson’s tragic passing on June 14, 2008, (as a result of a scuba diving accident) disrupted this undertaking, and only one of the albums, Leucocyte (ACT, 2008), was released at the time.
Three years later, in October and November 2011, Berglund and Öström revisited the material from that recording session and together, with the band’s regular sound engineer Ake Linton, made their own edit for an album which is now called 301, on the basis of the name of the studio where the album was recorded.
For more information on e.s.t., visit est-music.com. For more information on The ACT Company, visit actmusic.com.