Singer Sofia Jernberg Navigates Disparate Cultures

“With jazz I thought it must be OK to be Black, for the first time,” says singer Sofia Jernberg.

(Photo: Jon Edergren)

On Musho (Intakt), her recent duo album with pianist Alexander Hawkins, singer Sofia Jernberg interprets traditional songs from Ethiopia, the nation where she was born, and Sweden, the nation where she grew up, along with tunes from Armenia and England, to say nothing of the piece she wrote herself. The recording stands as one of the most arresting albums of 2024, in part because despite drawing on disparate folk traditions from around the globe, it elides any specific culture. While Hawkins and Jernberg deeply respect those traditions, they’re no more confined by them than they are by the jazz practices for which they’re both well known.

Jernberg, 41, has spent her entire life navigating disparate cultures not only in her work, but in her very existence. She was born in Ethiopia but was adopted and raised by a Swedish diplomat. Before Jernberg moved to Stockholm at age 10, she spent years also living in Hanoi, Vietnam. “I’m a bit split in my identity because I’m adopted and raised in a majority white culture, but I look like I was raised in something else,” she says. “I’ve always been treated like that by everybody.” Until she arrived in Sweden, Jernberg had virtually no contact with Western music. She had always sung informally, picking up sounds from the folk music she encountered as a young child, so once in Stockholm she was enrolled in a strict choir school where she was immersed in Western classical tradition, singing standard repertoire as well as the contemporary classical works composed by some of her teachers. Eventually one of the teachers played a song by Stevie Wonder in one of her classes and her curiosity was piqued. “I started to ask questions,” she says.

She began exploring record shops and immersed in any new sound she could find. She had already been experimenting with different techniques inherent in various traditional musics, but the possibilities expanded after encounters with the music of daring vocalists like Phil Minton and Diamanda Galas. “With jazz I thought it must be OK to be Black, for the first time,” she says. “That’s one of the things, but I also fell in love with it because it was a progressive genre. That’s how I interpreted it, that it constantly changes. All the heroes had an oeuvre, so you could follow how they started and how they ended up.” While still in school she encountered harsh dichotomies. “Music genres are very connected to cultural identity, and what class you’re from, how you want to feel and dress.” Jernberg embraced music in all of its rich variety, but early on she felt isolated with those feelings. “I’m always a displaced person in any situation. I have not met anyone who is like me, who’s seen three continents before they were 10, adopted, and raised by a single mother.”

Jernberg has resisted societal pressures since she began singing, and her multilayered work blithely ignores genre lines. She’s a world-class improviser with extravagant technique and a peerless classical singer with unerring pitch control and technical precision. She sings with chamber ensembles and modern jazz groups. During Jazzfest Saalfelden last August she performed an improvised duet with cellist Tomeka Reid, she sang as an equal member of the End, a hard-hitting band led by reedist Mats Gustafsson straddling hard rock and Scandinavian folk music, and she paired up with saxophonist Jonas Kullhammar as the front line in Petter Eldh’s Post Koma. Her voice is marked by a crystalline purity that can sound lighter than air, mirroring the weightless beauty of Minnie Ripperton, and she can tackle 20th century classical works by Arnold Schoenberg or Georges Apherghis with devastating exactitude and imagination. Jernberg rejects hierarchies or compartmentalization, taking on a dizzying range of work on its own terms, often to the detriment of her career in a business that prefers defining and slotting artists into this box or that one.

She first emerged on the international scene with Paavo, a shape-shifting ensemble she co-led with pianist Cecilia Persson, before joining Seval, a quartet organized by American cellist Fred Lonberg-Holm that interpreted his pop-like compositions with a wide-open improvisational aesthetic. Because of her inherent stylistic mobility, Jernberg often operates like a free agent, with countless collaborations and a handful of ongoing projects like the End, which has made three albums over the last six years, and the duo with Hawkins which began in 2016 with a partnership suggested by former Bimhuis director Huub van Riel during the October Meeting gathering, during which she also first performed with Swedish bassist Petter Eldh, who has regularly enlisted her in his bands Koma Saxo and Post Koma. She’s worked with the Norwegian trio Lama on a 2018 collaborative album for Clean Feed, collaborated with German free improv duo Superimpose, and she delved into her connection to Scandinavian folk on a remarkable project with the Trondheim Jazz Orchestra in 2019. It was through the TJO that she also cemented a partnership with the equally mobile pianist Cory Smythe, leading to the shape-shifting 2018 trio album Circulate Susanna (Pyroclastic) with guitarist Dan Lippel — a daring, skeptical look at Americana using Stephen Foster as a point of departure.

Although Jernberg isn’t averse to singing songs, she prefers to think of herself as an instrumentalist first and foremost. She laments the divide between singers and instrumentalists she’s experienced across her entire career. “I have worked a lot with how you stand on stage,” she says. “What I’ve done is just take away all hand movements and expressive movements, because often they’re cliche, and it takes away from music.” Performing with both the End and Post Koma, Jernberg deliberately situates herself as another member of the ensemble, not the focal point as with most singers.

Jernberg is also a composer, although evidence of this work is woefully scant. There’s a version of her mutable solo work “One Pitch: Birds For Distortion and Mouth Synthesizers” on a 2021 anthology of performances from New York’s Resonant Bodies Festival, and her song “Correct Behaviour” is a highlight of the Musho album. A solo album of her own work, which she spent eight years making, is on the near horizon, as are some U.S. performances in the near year. In April she will perform music by composer Chaya Czernowin at the LA Philharmonic and in May she’ll perform solo at the Park Avenue Armory in New York, as part of a series curated by pianist Jason Moran. She pointedly notes that the U.S. has dealt with multiculturalism for longer than Europe. “I’m often the first Black person in some contemporary Western stages in Europe,” she says. “Classical music really has problems. It is an authoritarian structure, and I’m always a little bit messed up afterwards. But, someone has to do it.” DB

from https://downbeat.com