Palle Danielsson: (15/10/1946 – 18/5/24)

I first became aware of bassist Palle Danielsson’s playing on a late night BBC Radio 3 broadcast by the Keith Jarrett European quartet, in August 1980. The fullness of his tone, particularly in the lower register, was the first thing that caught my attention. Yet his agility as a soloist across the whole range of the bass was also remarkable, as was his intuitive bond with drummer Jon Christensen. So I began to explore their records, with tracks such as ‘Spiral’ from Belonging becoming a favourite, with its urgent underlying rhythm and its spiky bass solo mirroring the angularity of both Jarrett’s and Jan Garbarek’s lines.

By the time he joined this group, in 1974, Palle had already been part of the circle of European musicians who worked alongside George Russell, and he had played and recorded with Steve Kuhn, as well as singers Monica Zetterlund and Karin Krog. His interest in unusual source material and time signatures had also brought him into the band Rena Rama, co-led by pianist Bobo Stenson and saxophonist Lennart Åberg, for which Danielsson contributed a number of compositions including ‘Circle Dance’.

Always preferring to be a sideman rather than a leader, Danielsson worked with a bewildering variety of musicians, from bebop veterans such as Lee Konitz, to the European free jazz of Albert Mangelsdorff, to the world-music-tinged work of Collin Walcott. He proved to be an effective contributor to Charles Lloyd’s quartet for a short while in the late 1980s, especially on the album Fish Out of Water. But there were some long associations, notably his work with Rita Marcotulli, from the mid-90s until 2015, but in particular with Stenson and saxophonist Joakim Milder.

The three of them were in the Tomasz Stańko Sextet playing the music of Krzysztof Komeda for the album and tour of Litania in the late 1990s, and then in the quartet Sister Maj’s Blouse along with drummer Fredrik Norén in the early 2000s, celebrating the work of the saxophonist / composer Börje Fredriksson. British audiences heard him more often when he teamed up in a trio with pianist John Taylor, first with Peter Erskine on drums, and then with Martin France. One of his more recent collaborations was with the saxophonist Fredrik Nordström, on the 2019 album Svensk Standard (just a trio with drummer Fredrick Rundqvist). On that, Palle’s lovely introduction to ‘Ute blåser sommarvind’ shows his playing to be as agile and beautiful as at any point in his long career.