May 22, 2007

EGBA

One of the first Swedish bands to fuse jazz and rock (and occasionally African and Latin-American music as well) was Egba, led by trumpeter Ulf Adåker (b. 1945) and saxophonist Ulf Andersson (b. 1940), two musicians with roots in the jazz of the 1960s. Several other musicians of that era also expanded their vocabulary to include the electronic sounds of the day, collaborating with younger musicians whose background was mainly in rock. One of the latter is pianist and keyboard-player Harald Svensson (b. 1954), who has also been involved in other groups, most notably Entra. Tenor saxophonist Ove Johansson (b. 1936) and keyboard-player Susanna Lindeborg (b. 1952) in the group Mwendo Dawa have combined acoustic instruments with electronic sounds since the 1970s, and there are several other groups which work with fusion types of jazz.