Rebecka Törnqvist

In the 1990s Rebecka Törnqvist played a decisive role in drawing attention to a new generation of young female jazz vocalists across Sweden, although her solo releases favored pop frameworks carrying strong jazz inflections over unadulterated jazz. Beyond cultivating imitators of that hybrid approach, she helped rekindle wider curiosity in the genre itself. Per “Texas” Johansson and other musicians later credited her with expanding the market reach of Swedish jazz. Her first album, A Night Like This, appeared the same year Bo Kaspers Orkester issued its own commercially successful jazzy debut. The two projects overlapped in certain respects, yet Bo Kaspers Orkester treated jazz with a witty, ironic distance and veered toward R&B, whereas Törnqvist proceeded without irony in a serious, mature, and smooth manner. Backed in 1993 by a sizable contingent of Sweden’s jazz elite—including Esbjörn Svensson, Anders Widmark, and Per “Texas” Johansson—she found both artistic and commercial success in the jazz-pop blend. Good Thing followed as an unambiguous pop statement tinted by sleek soul and blues. Stockholm Kaza Session, her first unadulterated jazz album, arrived in 1996 with saxophonist Per Texas Johansson, while Tremble My Heart two years later returned to the earlier pop-jazz mixture. The next year she joined the supergroup Gloria, assembled by Lars Halapi, sharing vocals with singer/songwriter Sara Isaksson; the collective released its self-titled album in 1999. Halapi also produced her 2001 solo album Vad Jag Vill, her first entirely in Swedish and a further departure from the understated jazz-pop that had first brought her recognition.