https://youtu.be/2SRJNqg7yTA
https://youtu.be/3uaTU0BlKu8

Esbjörn Svensson / piano

There are only a few figures in music whose work influences and shapes a genre as a whole. This is undoubtedly true of the Swede Esbjörn Svensson. With his trio e.s.t., the pianist and composer wowed audiences beyond age and genre affiliations. And his influence on jazz as a whole reverberates to this day and already within the second and third generation of musicians worldwide.

HOME.S. is Esbjörn Svensson's only solo album and the sheer existence of such a recording and its completely unexpected discovery over a decade after its creation are nothing less than a sensation: Since the early 1990s, Svensson focused almost his entire creative energy and recording activities on his work with e.s.t.. Thus, these new recordings are not only the first, but practically the only ones that show Svensson in a setting other than that of the trio: Intimate, concentrated and completely one with himself. The recordings for HOME.S. were made only a few weeks before Esbjörn Svensson's sudden death on June 14, 2008. Svensson recorded the music in his Swedish home.

For almost ten years afterwards, the album rested untouched in his wife Eva's personal archive. In this interview, she tells the story behind the discovery of the album and the music:

 

How exactly did you find this music?

After Esbjörn’s passing, I made sure all the contents of his computer were saved to backup hard drives. And then I basically left them untouched for the next ten years. At the point where I eventually felt ready to look into the material, I soon realised that there was something I wanted to look into. I took the hard drive and went to Gothenburg to meet with Åke Linton, the sound engineer who had worked on all e.s.t. albums as well as on their live shows. He was also the one who had helped me to save the material from Esbjörn’s computer in the first place. So he probably already knew that there was s.......
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