Roland Keijser

“en enkel virtuos i en tid av allt komplexare enfald!”

Our loss is immense

Here are some photos by Jan Öqvist from Roland’s funeral and the memorial gathering afterwords on February 21, 2019

Greek Song – Körkort

Four tenors in praise of Roland Keijser,from the memorial get-together:

Here is a newly found video of Roland and Kjell Westling improvising together at ISKRA‘s 20 year celebration at Fasching in Stockholm. They improvise around Tenderly, Halling from Gudbrandsdalen, How Much is that Doggie in the Window and Changs Polska:

A giant on the Swedish music scene

Roland Keijser who made his Country & Eastern debut on The Vedbod Tapes is a giant on the Swedish music scene since long, eternally curious in free music, jazz of any variety, folk music from Sweden, Morocco and India, a pioneer in “world music” with a multitude of recordings to his name. He is mainly a reed and flute person but he is not afraid to try ANYTHING. You will enjoy meeting him if you haven’t before.

His own words

His liner notes to CE20 will give you a good view of Roland and his thinking. In a “vedbod” (woodshed in swedish) in the swedish countryside three young instrumentalists from the progressive music movement met for three days in the summer of 1977 to play as many meaningful notes as possible. Here are quite a few of them on one cd and one digital-only album with two long extra tracks of spontaneous music, colored by jazz, swedish folk and what not.

Roland and Kjell

The musicians are long time associates who have worked together in various musical combinations thru the years. Kjell Westling is the multi-instrument genious that you find on quite a few of our albums. He sadly passed away in 2010. You might have come across the name Bengt Berger since I’m the drummer who is running Country & Eastern. Here are photos from The Vedbod Tapes recordings:

Chapter Seven

Roland was an important member of Chapter 7 from 1988, here he is featured after a beautiful double bass intro in a video from our concert at Fasching that year: