Jazz is sexy

By Erik Hörstadius
Published: SlitzFebruary/ March 1992
Translation by picsou

Stina Nordenstam does make me a bit envious. At 22 she had her breakthrough with the album Memories Of A Colour. Critics have been pouring praise on her. On her voice, but also her songs that she wrote and arranged all herself. Not even Lena Philipsson not Madonna do.

But that is not what triggers my envy. Making records is actually not my business, even if I sure would like to possess the talent. No, what is gnawing me since I met her in a bar in Stockholm while looking for the person behind the thin, slightly childlike voice, and the cool, particular instrumental meditations, it is not the success itself, but rather the work that lies behind it. The honest and persistent work.

Most people work. Stefan Edberg works. He repeats and repeats his forehand, and trains his legs in order to come faster to the net. Carl Bildt works hard, on things he surely often finds interesting. Sara works, or whatever the female cashier at the local Seven-Eleven is.
They mostly work to achieve something. Work is a means, not a goal in itself. A means to a Grand Slam title, power, money, the rent. Ulf Lundell has talked about that type of work that? (problem with the scanning) actually very primitive: to have something to drag home to the cave, home to one's kins.
That is to say, one works to feel one is needed or to be loved.
But not Stina Nordenstam.

- Doing the record was a happy time. There is a joy in pure hard work, before it is ready. The songs are the commissioned work to myself.

And she says in a way that immetiadely springs to my mind an image of a little girl with an expression of utter concentration in her face, impossible to reach by outsiders, absorbed in creating, and completely uninterested in money, glory and fame. I am convinced that she would still write songs even if that was as hard as working in a mine, which maybe it is, what od I know?, and as depised as distributing parking tickets.
This is what makes me, journalist writing to get the bread, pressed by deadlines and rent, and the need of celebrity, so envious when I am sitting with this article. My work is not hard and pure, it is easy and dirty; while Stina, the enviable, goes one with the delight of writing a sentence, a phrase.

- It almost tastes like ? (problem with scanning programme)