Bernt Rosengren

Bernt Rosengren stood among Sweden’s foremost tenor saxophonists, his sound profoundly shaped by Sonny Rollins. This robust-toned, forceful improviser first drew notice at age nineteen while performing with the Jazz Club 57 quintet, and two years later he was selected to represent his country in the Newport Jazz Band during its American engagement. His playing appeared in 1961 on the soundtrack of Roman Polanski’s first feature, Knife in the Water. Several of Rosengren’s recordings headed Swedish jazz polls, among them Stockholm Dues in 1965, Improvisations in 1969, and Notes from Underground in 1974. During the mid-sixties he joined trumpeter Thad Jones in a sextet directed by pianist George Russell, the American musician then residing in Europe. Although he maintained his allegiance to hard bop throughout his career, Rosengren pursued post-bop explorations in the late sixties alongside trumpeter Don Cherry in his quartet, and in the early to mid-seventies he merged jazz with Turkish and Middle Eastern folk traditions inside the ensemble Sevda. In 1975 he began regular appearances with Swedish baritone saxophonist Lars Gullin while also launching his own big band. Throughout the eighties he collaborated with American hard-bop musicians that included guitarist Doug Raney and pianist Horace Parlan. The nineties brought a jazz tribute to the score of Porgy and Bess, realized as The Bernt Rosengren Octet Plays George Gershwin’s Porgy & Bess, along with prominent featured work on trumpeter Rolf Ericson’s final album, I Love You So, issued in 1995 on Amigo. Reaching sixty in 1997, Rosengren retained the vigor and endurance of a much younger player and sustained an active performing and recording schedule well into his late seventies, issuing Songs in 2017. Bernt Rosengren died on May 14, 2023, at the age of eighty-five.