Georg Riedel didn’t just have one great career as a musician, he had two. The first, as a jazz bassist, was better than most. The other, as a composer, was completely unique: central and at the same time idiosyncratic, super broad and at the same time deeply personal.
When he as a 20-year-old took a place on the then very vital Stockholm jazz scene, he got a job with the giant Lasse Gullin: it’s Riedel’s rubber-tongued and cat-soft bass – he always sounds so calm! – we hear in the milestone “Danny’s dream” (1954), including a rare bass solo over sizzling beat drum. Monica Zetterlund’s “Sakta vi gå gönem stan” (1961) became a long-lived monster hit in a cool explosive arrangement by Georg Riedel – in Quincy Jones style: brittle and light with flute and sword trumpets, a wild energy in hip reins. And it is Riedel’s bass that can be heard (a lot of it, too) on Jan Johansson’s record “Jazz på svenska”, the biggest pop phenomenon in Swedish jazz.
But it’s like composer Georg Riedel made an indelible mark on cultural heritage. In a very seventies-typical way, he took the deep musicality, the carefree complexity, with him from jazz and went completely different ways: to a children’s music with such a unique fusion of seriousness and playfulness that it has become a national treasure.
Ida’s summer song. The Alfons Åberg signature (you can talk about carefree complexity there!).
When Latin Kings in 1993 with their first single would signal that they came up with something completely new, it was Riedel’s music from Emil in Lönneberga that the Salazar brothers mixed into the beat: hip-hop from the Swedish concrete.
Georg Riedel’s music is a living, singing link between generations, ages and experiences. Unique and absolutely magnificent. “Call the court! The king should comment!”, we say at the editorial board’s morning meeting without irony. If there is something that unites today’s Sweden, in a completely indisputable way and with a deeply positive charge, I think it is Ida’s summer song.
