“Dancemusic as dancemusic is the concept behind American-Swedish composer Matthew Peterson’s Dance Party Playlist. The five-movement suite was commissioned by Stockholm Saxophone Quartet for their 50-year-jubilee 2019 and combines clever Baroque dance forms wtih pop-conventions from every one of the ensemble’s active decades. The Allemande meets the 70s disco and funk while a lively gigue finds new energy from the 2010s hiphop and electronic-dance-music (EDM).

Just as cool and audacious is the groove on the title-track - tailor-made for Linn Perssons baritone saxophone in contrapuntal dialogue with itself. Smooth fat nasty is therefore an equally appropriate and atypical title for an album with contemporary classical music that both builds-up and subverts all possible conventions.

To use the banal and kitschy to his advantage is a fun-filled technique that Peterson probably picked up as a former student of Sven-David Sandström. In similarity with the composer-nestor, who passed away last year, he disregards the division between high and low culture to simply compose what he himself seems to enjoy. In Lament for Sven-David Sandström solemn and beautiful music transforms the saxophone quartet to a new sound-organism somewhere between a string quartet and a church organ. Vingar, virvlar is a more serious game, where Linn Persson’s soprano saxophone and Kristin Uglar’s tenor saxophone draft off one another as in the synchronized formations of flying swans.

Stockholm Saxophone Quartet is an institution in Swedish musical life and has always had an unusually active desire to communicate across genres and generations. But seldom have they sounded as stylish and groovy as on Peterson’s portrait album, with the current rejuvenated team of Mathias Karlsen Björnstad, Jörgen Pettersson, Theo Hillborg, and Linn Persson. The latter is a lone tough, queen of the hill, in the solo work The baddest girl on the mountain. Here euphoric folk-fiddle rhythms invert the masculine Halling solo dance, with the alto saxophone like a “mouth-harp on steroids” to quote the composer himself.” - Johanna Paulsson (translation from Swedish by the composer)