Bo Kaspers Orkester is Better than Ever

Bo Kaspers Orkester played with massive sound but with the soul of a quartet.

The Swedish pop-soul-jazz band had by now performed together for over 30 years and recorded 12 albums. The players were currently in their late 50s and early 60s—and while not all wine gets better with age—the Bo-Kaspers-Wine does.

Bo Sundström, who will be 61 in October, moved on the stage at Kulttuuritalo in Helsinki like James Brown or Michael Jackson but looked like Frank Sinatra in his dark suit and gray fedora.

Sundström inhaled the past; exhaled the present.

The setlist included “Undantag” (The Exception) from their album I centrum (1998) (In the center). The piano-powered ballad with a Latin tinge inspired some in the sold-out crowd to take salsa steps in their seat.

“Där vill jag vara” (I Want To Be There) from their latest album 23:55 was a choir-driven song that could easily be compared to the best work by the late American soul singer Curtis Mayfield.

“If you’re going to play real soul music, you must have a really good soul choir with you,” said Sundström and introduced Anders von Hofsten, Pablo Cepeda and Ida Sandlund, whose harmonies supported the instrumentalists and the frontman with their siren song.

“Allt ljus på mig” (All The Lights On Me) was a different animal with its bona fide groove by drummer Fredrik Dahl and bassist Mats Schubert. It was a song about being in the spotlight, and Sundström went all out after saying that after the pandemic he had missed being in the center of things.

Now he was. And the crowd loved him for it.

“Diskotek,” released in 2015 on Redo att gå sönder (Ready To Break Apart), made the crowd go crazy. People simply could not resist one of the funkiest tunes in Scandinavian funk and soul music and while watching Sundström dancing the moonwalk and sliding across the stage with the balls of his feet, they stepped up and waved their hands and shook their hips with no shame in their game following Sundström’s motto that he shared earlier:

“It’s better to dance ugly than not dance at all.”

“Vi kommer alldrig att dö” (We Will Never Die) from Amerika (1996) sent the audience on a trip down the memory lane thinking of what’s been done in the past and what could be done in the future before it’s all over.

Based on the erupting applause that followed the song and filled the hall it was clear what these people would do in the future, should Bo Kaspers Orkester ever again cross the Gulf of Bothnia to bring a slice of Swedish soul to its neighbor, a gift damn near better than the meatballs of the furniture firm.