Otis Sandsjö's Y-OTIS

Modern, "liquid" jazz informed by hip-hop & electronic music, while keeping a foot firmly in jazz traditions

Nov 02, 2022

Y-Otis is a four-piece, sometimes three-piece, jazz collective from Berlin started by Swedish saxophonist Otis Sandsjö and jazz bassist & composer — also from Sweden — Petter Eldh. With Dan Nicholls on keys and Tilo Weber playing drums, they create what's been dubbed "Liquid Jazz".

It took me a minute to figure out that the group itself is called “Y-OTIS”... and so is the album, but it’s technically an “Otis Sandsjö” album, or something. Otis has introduced the group saying “Y-Otis”, so that’s just what I’m going to call them.

Every member of the band has multiple side-gigs, but — from what I could gather reading translated articles — this is mainly an Otis Sandsjö & Petter Eldh project with Tilo Weber and other various players.

[“Liquid Jazz”] It has to do with how Tilo Weber, our drummer, and Petter Eldh on bass, can move forward and backward in time, but still play a steady beat, sort of.
― Otis Sandsjö

So far they’ve recorded 2 albums, Y-OTIS (2018) and Y-OTIS 2 (2020). To my untrained ear the first album mostly kinda sounds like a typical jazz album — perfectly competent just nothing really catching my attention… except for one track: “YUNG” [Acinor is good too, but YUNG is on another level].

I don’t have the jazz vocabulary to describe it properly, but as someone not really into jazz, I could listen to it on a loop (and have). All I can say is to listen to it — the video for it is perfect as well.

It seems they leaned more into the modern, inspired-by-electronic-music-and-hip-hop vibe with their second album, Y-OTIS 2. While I was apathetic toward most of their first album, I’ve been listening to 2 on repeat for several weeks now. There’s definitely a unique dynamic created using modern electronic music production techniques then playing it back using more traditional jazz techniques that captures my attention in ways most jazz just doesn’t.

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