If an extra-terrestrial curious to learn about jazz landed on the planet, he could be forgiven for expressing surprise at the amount of jazz recorded today that gives no hint that the Beatles ever happened. He might conclude that with a constant stream of albums sounding as if they were recorded in 1958 and not 2008, jazz was now more about the past than the present. However, Leucocyte would reassure him that the music was not drifting towards virtuostic recapitulation. It sounds as if it was made now. And it comes straight from the heart, comprising spontaneously conceived improvisations, often coloured by electronic sounds, that have an energy and dark intensity that e.s.t. had not revealed on previous albums. Recorded during their 2007 Australia tour, the completed album was delivered to ACT on 16 May. As is now well known, a month later Svensson was dead, the victim of a tragic diving accident. He left behind what is probably his finest statement on record.

His improvisations, based on the time-no-changes principal, are never in a hurry to make their point. It is music that gains its greatest immediacy through the collective musical empathy of this remarkable group, such as the two part ‘Premonition’ comprising ‘Earth’ at around 17 minutes and ‘Contorted’ at around six minutes. Here were musicians at the top of their game who since the formation of the band in 1992 had developed an almost telepathic musical understanding – the way Öström’s powerful rhythmic beats that melt into sensitive percussive shading (‘Leucocyte’ parts I, II and III), or Berglund’s pizzicato playing can suddenly swell with orchestral grandeur as he changes to bowed accompaniment, all the while closely following the contours of Svensson’s improvisations.

Yet ultimately, this contemporary masterpiece reveals itself at its most profound in the way the exposition and development of these spontaneously conceived compositions assume the kind of organic unity associated with formal composition.  Stuart Nicholson

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