Ida Nielsen performs at the Stockholm Jazz Festival. We can not tell her that she played with Prince, but she still does the job rather frighteningly than sexy, writes DN critic, Johannes Cornell.

Stockholm Jazz Festival 2018.

Artists: Ida Nielsen, The Bad Plus, Yazz Ahmed.

Scenes: City Hall Theater, Fasching.

Playing bass slaps while listening to the word "funk" seems to be pretty retarded today. The Danish Ida Nielsen, however, has almost carte blanche: she played with Prince, probably the most awesome musician the world has ever heard, James Brown. But that can not be helped. Nielsen's concert at the Kulturhuset Stadsteatern studio gets too brutal and for singles, as funk as when he's just stupid and painless instead of sexy.

Now she is not the only one to refer to Prince at the festival. The guitarist Cory Wong, who played Sunday at the Studion (magazine DN 17/10), has meanwhile created a much more eccentric concept. Instead of getting caught, he speeds up his desperate funk inflation process, as very few contiguous artists and Prince have managed to avoid him since the 80s. But Prince also seems to have done so part of something that has to do with all of his hometown of Minneapolis. Wong is from there. And it's also The Bad Plus, who plays at Fasching during the festival.

Last year, the pianist was replaced Ethan Iverson outside against Orrin Evans, but before that, he had with Reid Anderson on bass and Dave King on drums together for eighteen years. It's a long time for a jazz band, and with this purchase you can of course draw a parallel with the Swedish e.s.t. In fact, The Bad Plus, especially when they play the most lyrical, reminds many Esbjörn Svensson and Company. Their perhaps most distinguished thing has been the wild blanket of different pop songs. But during this concert, they play exclusively in an original way, and at this point, they are a map lower than e.s.t. If nothing else, they were more funky when they played Blondie and Nirvana.

We can discuss it, like what we really mean by funky. There were elements in both the fusion and in the old groove and the organ jazz. Then he appeared with acid jazz, then again through links between jazz and club music, like drum n'bass. And there are many more than today. Another evening at Fasching, for example, the British trumpet player Yazz Ahmed is on stage with a concept combining jazz with Arabic music, both with a rhythm clearly influenced by the club. Just for fun – think if Ahmed had turned this scheme?

As a rule, built Drums of this kind a lot of subdivision, if not always as extreme as just drum bass, at least in that direction. It's as if someone had calculated that it should theoretically match the way a jazz drummer plays – stuck in an updated vintage. In fact, it works like this. Ironically, since you play in a club culture, you rarely succeed in shaking the feeling that it is more thoughtful than instinctively. At Yazz Ahmed, most of the members of the group stand out with their common writing lines, while at the same time they urgently need organic, energy or flow in addition to the sum of musical components. .

There is no uninteresting but well-written music and with refined starting points that sound and acoustics have recorded in St. Paul's Cathedral in London. But I remind you that the brain can rarely convince the body of something that it does not know.