August 28, 2015

Friday night live at Transistor: avant-garde / Kraut jazz from Swedish duo Mats Dimming / Hampus Öhman-Frölund and worldly-inspired jazz from Malena Quartet. Sound by Jon Monteverde.

Bassist Mats Dimming is one of Sweden’s most hard-working musicians. He is everywhere all the time; he basically lives on trains and flights, all for the love of music. People that have had the honor to work with Mats are MoMoTop, APUH!, David Stackenäs, Jonas Knutsson, The Original Swedish Arvika Blues Breakers and many more.

Hampus Öhman-Frölund just emigrated from Sweden to New York City. He is the drummer for pop acts such as Teen Commandments and Jens Lekman but is also active in the free improv field, where he’s played with APUH!, Skarv and more.

They played a free-improvised set.

Visit Mats Dimming on Soundcloud. Visit Hampus Öhman-Frölund’s Tumblr page.

María Elena hails from a small East Coast town called Foxborough, Massachusetts. She started playing saxophone the summer after third grade when her brother switched to tenor saxophone and she happened across the alto one day. In high school she studied both saxophone and clarinet with metro-Boston legends Ken Reid and Mark Miller. She graduated from Foxborough High School, having been a leadership figure in many facets of the music program there. While in high school María had the honor of performing at President Obama’s first inauguration with the Kennedy Center’s “Let Celebration Swing” concert in 2008.

María continued her studies at Michigan State University, where she studied under the great Wess Anderson and Diego Rivera. There she also began her career as a writer and arranger, and performing at the Detroit Jazz Festival in 2012 with MSU. Currently, María leads the Malena Quartet, which features original compositions and arrangements. María also freelances across a variety of genres while growing her studio of students in the Ann Arbor Music Center and MSU’s Community Music School in Detroit.

For their performance at Transistor, the Malena Quartet played a set of original music by saxophonist María Elena that explores the rich inner world inside us all. Through the lens of a jazz quartet expect funky beats, soundscape moments, trance vamps and soaring melodies.

Visit Malena Quartet’s website.