Sinne Eeg Group
Sinne Eeg Group at Dokkhuset. Photo: Arne Hauge

Sinne Eeg Group - concert report

The jazz audience in Trondheim showed up in full when the authorities now finally opened up. Suddenly we sat close together and there was a tense atmosphere in the room when Ernst Wiggo Sandbakk quickly and informatively welcomed the audience back and "Jazzfest Exclusive" could welcome Sinne Eeg Group - after four canceled attempts!

They opened with a hefty version of "My Favorite Things". Full of tempo changes and nice vocal details. Sinne Eeg is not a singer who closes her eyes and "goes into herself". No, she addresses the audience directly almost as an actress. There is communication without facts and the text is articulated clearly. She turns and twists tones, words and phrases and really plays with text and melody. They calmed down a bit with "The Beauty of Sadness", (text: S. Eeg) and it struck me that she has this ability to capture the mood of a song / text and keep it for a long time. The audience was fully present and you could hear the famous pin. The drummer took out the brushes and now it worked better acoustically as well.

Yes, it could almost seem as if both the band and the sound engineer were a little surprised that the acoustics changed when it suddenly became full house. It was effective when she sang a cappella the whole "It Might As Well be Spring". When comp finally came in, the tonality was perfect and pianist Jacob Christoffersen excelled with an exciting improvisation, something he did on several of the songs. It could almost seem as if the mood among the audience rose, perhaps because the musicians managed to convey the idea that it will soon be spring.

Sinne is perhaps first and foremost a fantastic communicator of "The American Songbook", but she also composes songs herself in several genres. She told us that she was a very curious person, who was often inspired by genuine country music and folk music from all over the world. She had either composed or written the lyrics for half of the songs herself. In a nice Latin song, which was a tribute to a barista, (did not get the title with me), she really showed how good she is with scat singing. Clearly inspired by Ella Fitzgerald, but she takes the scattering further and it's almost like hearing an instrumentalist. Melodic and with an impressive harmonic overview, perhaps not so strange when you know that she played alto saxophone as a young woman.

It was also nice when she really pulled on her own "Silence" and used head sounds almost like a classical singer. On the whole, her voice has an impressive range of sounds that make it never boring to listen to. One can well understand that she attracts attention wherever she performs, Los Angeles, Tokyo, Madrid or Copenhagen.

One of the highlights of the concert for me was when they performed Michel Legrand's magnificent "The Windmills of Your mind". The text is written by Alan and Marilyn Bergman. Marilyn died in January and the musicians dedicated this version to her. Beautifully performed.

In the sixties and seventies, ie in the last century, many American jazz musicians settled in Copenhagen. A.o. Dexter Gordon, Ben Webster, Kenny Drew and Stan Getz. They played a lot with Danish musicians, which in turn led to a sky-high level among the musicians. Especially in what we like to call traditional "mainstream jazz". The high level has then been continued by the next generation of musicians. Sinne Eeg and her fellow musicians can be proof of just that. Admittedly, both bassist Lennart Ginman and drummer Jukkis Uotila have Finnish origins, but they have worked as musicians in Denmark for many years. There is something solid about the game that is about tradition and experience.

They ended with a wonderful blues "Better That Anything" and the audience did not give up until it became an extra number. It was a self-composed long distance love song and I think that absolutely everyone went home happy in the nice winter night.

Thanks to Jazzfest - who never gives up!

-Helge Førde