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Copenhagen Jazz Festival 2013
Copenhagen, Denmark
July 12-14, 2013
The annual Copenhagen Jazz Festival, with more than a thousand concerts during ten days—spread over more than hundred places and stages across the city—is a special, unique affair. Like other big jazz festivals, it also has its headliners—big names, mostly American, like
Terence Blanchard
trumpetb.1962
Richard Bona
bass, electricb.1967
Chick Corea
piano1941 - 2021
Bill Frisell
guitar, electricb.1951
Charles Lloyd
saxophoneb.1938
Marcus Miller
bassb.1959
David Murray
saxophone, tenorb.1955
It's up to the visitor to make more or less sharp choices, restrict him/herself or just roaming the city and attending performance at random. Visiting performances at favorite areas or places is also a possibility, or following favorite, interesting musicians' performances at different places in different groups. This last variant is a specialty of the Copenhagen festival. Anyway, it's important to come prepared; some topographical study of the city might be useful in order to get an idea how to get to different places (in time). A thorough study is even advisable and the well-designed festival app—downloadable through the festival website—is an extremely useful tool to do so.
2013 was my second visit to the festival. Last year I restricted myself to just two performances by
Jakob Bro
guitarb.1978
Thomas Morgan
bass, acoustic
Jon Christensen
drums1943 - 2020
Chris Speed
saxophoneThis year, however, I moved in wider circles during three days, with the ILK Collective and the ILK venue as focal point. Friday, July 12 (the first day) offered 137 concerts, Saturday 130, and Sunday—also the last day of the festival—76. There will be much left to explore in coming years, but during this year's three days I not only attended concerts, but had talks with a couple of musicians.
Day 1: Saturday, July 12
The first stop: K?dbyen, the old meatpacking district behind Copenhagen's Central Station. There are three places with concerts, among them the venue of the ILK Collective. The district is a vast area with low-rise functional buildings, some of which are still functioning in their original form. Others have been transformed into restaurants, galleries and studios, or function as offices for creative business companies. There is a section with white buildings, another with grey buildings and yet another with brown buildings. It is now a popular place to go out and a place for trendy nightlife.
The three music venues are situated in the brown area, closest to the Central Station. It is the oldest area and dates back to 1883. Here the DGI-byen can be found—a sports, swimming and conference complex—and the exhibition hall ?ksnehallen, originally a stable for 1,600 cattle prior to being slaughtered. The newer white area still serves its original purpose, housing businesses related to the meat industry. The grey part is a smaller area, with cultural activities, offices and meat industries.
The first concert attended was at the Ph-Cafee, where Italian pianist
Emanuele Maniscalco
drumsb.1983
Later, the evening continued outside on a small open-air stage in the backyard of the café, where young Danish pianist
Soren Gemmer
pianob.1984
Not only does the audience move criss-cross throughout the city; the musicians do also, very often playing several concerts at different places on different days. Logistics and transportation are mostly self-organized, and frequently visible.
Nothing is specially rebuilt or redesigned; instead, venues are left in their old shape and more or less decayed state, with clear traces of their former industrial usage. The front, for example, an old car repair shop can now be found serving as a bio restaurant, an example of the re-aestheticization. Having your biological meal on spark plugs—Bosch bougies.
The music going on during the festival is an integral part of bigger whole. No efforts were made to create a huge mono-functional festival space. It was up to people to drop in or out at the venues, entry of which was for decent ticket prices—or even for free. This applied all over the town during the ten days of the festival.
To get to the ILK venue, it was necessary to enter through a small port in a railing to get to the slaughterhouse blocks. The music was happening in a compartment at the end of the 5e cross block. No clearing up or redesigning, either inside or outside; instead, just the raw state—simple, with some sparse accents as minimal necessary lighting. It was a receptive sphere, where it could be sensed that the music was being played for, shared and carried by an eager audience. A sphere, then, of joint attention and adventure.
Going for a completely unknown group, Eggs Laid By Tigers, only drummer
Peter Bruun
drums
Simon Toldam
piano
Django Bates
pianob.1960
Samuel Blaser
tromboneb.1981
Marc Ducret
guitarb.1957
Han Bennink
drumsb.1942
It came as a total surprise when the group started: three guitarists sang heartfelt songs in colorful and vital close harmony. It felt as if Levon Helm was suddenly back on earth or ... but wait, these guys clearly were songsmiths of their own. What they gave were songs comprising a basic musical feeling expressed straight but in a sophisticated way—songs evoking happy moments of memory, facing the future wide awake and dream-facing. That kind of quality of pure joy. Brunn sang and played acoustic guitar from behind his drum kit; Toldam played on old Phillips organ from the '60s. The bass guitarist sang the lead in close unison with electric guitarist Martin Ullits Dahl. The group's excellent lead singer ultimately turned out to be Berlin-based jazz bassist " data-original-title="" title="">Jonas Westergaard. A really surprising, seizing metamorphosis.
Eggs Laid By Tigers? The image originates from Dylan Thomas (1914-1953). The group's songs were based on texts by the author of the famous play Under Milk Wood—again surprisingly unique—and its first album, Under The Mile Off Moon (available as vinyl plus download only) will soon be released worldwide.
This first encounter shed a light on the ILK Collectiveand its artistic and musical layout. ILK—Independent Label Kopenhagen—is a collective founded 10 years ago by a group of young musicians in order to create an independent manner to record, document, distribute and perform their own music. As drummer
Kresten Osgood
drumsA stable number of 20 musicians are now members of the collective:
Anders Banke
saxophone, tenor
Jacob Anderskov
piano
Jesper Lovdal
saxophone, tenorKresten Osgood
drums
Lotte Anker
saxophoneb.1958
Stefan Pasborg
drumsb.1974
"
data-original-title="" title="">Stephan Sieben; Sture Ericson; S?ren Kj?rgaard and Torben Snekkestad
saxophoneDuring the festival, ILK ran 48 concerts with 95 musicians, also celebrating its own 10th anniversary. The program consisted of local and global bands with internationally acknowledged performers including
Koichi Makigami
vocals
Gerald Cleaver
drumsb.1963
Phil Minton
vocalsb.1940
Mikko Innanen
saxophoneb.1978
Butch Lacy
piano1947 - 2018
Johannes Bauer
trombone1954 - 2016
Axel Dorner
trumpetb.1964
Jon Balke
pianob.1955
Jeff Ballard
drumsb.1963
Paul Bley
piano1932 - 2016
Andrew Cyrille
drumsb.1939
Henry Grimes
bass, acoustic1935 - 2020
Evan Parker
saxophone, sopranob.1944
Craig Taborn
pianob.1970
John Tchicai
saxophone1936 - 2012
Cuong Vu
trumpetb.1969
ILK is a forerunner which has triggered the foundation of new collectives and labels. During the past ten years a distinctive artistic profile of openness and diversity has been created, liberated from various kinds of patterns, postulates and prescriptions and dedicated to explorative risk-taking, intuition and consciousness of form serving the creation of firm new expression.
Day 2: Sunday, July 13
The second day began with an interview with drummer/pianist Emanuele Maniscalco, originally from Brescia, in Northern Italy. For the past year he has been studying at the Rhythmic Music Conservatory in Copenhagen to deepen his piano capabilities. Denmark has a tradition of musical education where classically notated music and rhythmic music are distinguished on all levels of schooling, hence the name of the conservatory. Together with Swiss guitarist
Roberto Pianca
guitar, electricb.1984
Nicolas Masson
saxophoneb.1972
Maniscalo gave some insight into the recording of Third Reel at the Lugano Studio. Issues such as the balancing of body and mind in music-making were touched upon, as well as the minimal means principle, the importance of early memory as a source in music and slowing things down.
The first concert of the day took place in the Frederiksberg district. Frederiksberg is a fashionable, green area in the western part of Copenhagen, with the oasis of Frederiksberg Gardens. It is more posh than N?rrebro and Vesterbro, and the people living here are usually older and more established. The main street through Frederiksberg is Gammel Kongevej: shopping, sushi restaurants, cafes and delis. The same is true for V?rnedamsvej Street, which is both cozy and cool.
Pianist
Nikolaj Hess
piano
I decided to take a bike to get to different venues spread around the city. Copenhagen is a biker-friendly city, as popular as Amsterdam, even, and the bike paths were perfect, even though it took more than double the time to Fasanenvej, which meant more than 50 minutes. The next destination was back in the center of town at K?dbye, and then back to the northeastern part to Statens Museum for Kunst. After half a day crossing the city, some useful reference points were revealed and some good routes so that the next and final day, it went both more smoothly and quickly by bike.
Nikolaj Hess was probably the busiest musician in town during the festival. He did at least three concerts per day—very often, even six. Finally meeting him for a talk on Sunday, before a trio concert with his two brothers, saxophonist Emil and drummer Mikkel, he had played the night before until 4 o'clock in the morning at Hess Spacelab, then took the early train to Aarhus in the northwestern part of Denmark for a festival gig, returned to play the trio gig and then, again, did the late night Hess Spacelab. The Spacelab was a regular jam spot in the center of the town, where festival artists like
Joe Lovano
drumsb.1952
Tony Scherr
bass
Kenny Wollesen
drumsBartof Café is one of the small club/café venues in Copenhagen with regular programming of attractive live concerts at a high level. During the festival. Hess played there in various combinations, with
Pierre Dorge
guitarb.1946
George Garzone
saxophone, tenorb.1950
Bob Rockwell
saxophoneAfter this intimate gig, a meeting with young Danish saxophonist/composer Niels Lyhne L?kkegaard revealed his latest projects. L?kkegaard released the extraordinary Vesper (Self Produced) last year. He was probably one of the rare exceptions of a Copenhagen jazz musician who—due to the birth of his second child—was not involved in any festival gigs. He is very much into exploring different aspects tone colors, their layering, extension and expansion. His newest work, written solely in his head and then recorded with a group of apt performers, explores the interferences of tonal colors of multiple clarinets. It reveals a process that works more and more for the composer.
From Frederiksberg, it was then back on the bike to the ILK venue in K?dbye, where the threesome of reedist Sture Ericson, bassist Nils Bo Davidsen and drummer Peter Bruun were playing. Bruun was part of an impressive performance with trombonist Samuel Blaser and guitarist Marc Ducret at Jazzdor in Berlin. Here it was a revelation once again, because of the masterful inventive way these musicians created real-time music.
Both Davidson and Ericson are top-notch musicians, with bassist Davidson perhaps one of the best-kept secrets of Danish jazz. They played one long piece, which started with a kind of sound exorcism and continued as a miraculous flow of abstract sounds. Unusual sound configurations proceeded in a fluent and seemingly logical way, creating a wondrous coherent whole. After this surprising experience Bruun met for a chat which touched on questions like unintended involvement in the creative process of real-time music—its paradoxes, tensions and pitfalls—and the dialectics of rules, patterns and clichés. Bruun has two new releases on vinyl—Under The Mile Off Moon, by Eggs Laid By Tigers, and even hotter off the press, Unintended Consequences, a quintet album with a stellar lineup of pianist S?ren Kj?rgaard, saxophonist/clarinetist
Torben Snekkestad
saxophone
Eivind Lønning
trumpetb.1983
Danes are apparently fond of vinyl and carefully designed sleeves and boxes. Owning some beautiful pieces already, it's clear that vinyl is meant to be something special , but this is no exception at all in the Danish context. Many albums on ILK are released as vinyl only, which means it is not an extra but a special category connected with a special way of listening to music. In the case of Unintended Consequences, the back of the sleeve is designed as a studio sheet with handwritten information on the original recording tapes. The copies of the Unintended Consequences vinyl are numbered and also have the following additional handwritten info on the album: "The consequences of an act may be unintended or intended. A state of affairs is an unintended consequence of an act if it results from the act , although it was not the aim of the act to bring about this state of affairs. An intended consequence of an act, on the other hand, reflects a will, plan, or desire to make a particular state of affairs obtain. Only conscious beings with complex mental states can have aims in this way. Tables and avalanches, for example, do not." A special mental and emotional space: a new culture of listening is being created by the committed reintroduction of this kind of vinyl.
After an inspiring conversation with Bruun it was back on the bike again, changing places from ILK to Statens Museum For Kunst, where
Bill Frisell
guitar, electricb.1951
Palle Mikkelborg
trumpetb.1941
Carsten Dahl
pianob.1967
Miles Davis
trumpet1926 - 1991
Bill Frisell brought the work of his new album, Big Sur (Okeh, 2013) to the Museum's stage. The quintet of the recording—cellist
Hank Roberts
cellob.1954
Eyvind Kang
violab.1971
Jenny Scheinman
violinb.1979
Rudy Royston
drumsThe album contains great pieces of music and the string thing is challenging. But the question was if it would also work well in a stretched out version live. Apparently it did not appeal to the audience as a whole. There were listeners who were deeply drawn in and there were listeners who found it monotonous. Within the long arches, the sheer endless repetition of colors and shifts were poor. The emphasis was on the broad meandering of melodic lines evoked by all five string-instruments. There was, however, some spectrality. Kang sometimes went cautiously into microtonal playing; there was some integrated soloing by the violins which lifted the music up occasionally, and unison playing with a minute time lag or contrasting bowing direction helped counterbalance the music a bit.
Making it back to ILK in time to hear the rawer qualities of pianist Simon Toldam's Little Stork Orchestra, consisting of Sture Ericson on alto sax and bass clarinet, Mads Hyhne, trombone, and Jimmy Nyborg, trumpet, plus bassist Nils Davidsen and drummer Peter Bruun. It was a heavily contrasting thing in body and mind with the preceding experience, a strong salute to the Copenhagen summer night. The music of Toldam's group shifted in ever surprising ways between dusky, shadowy movements, frenetic outbursts and clear melodic shapes (traces of
Sun Ra
piano1914 - 1993
Charlie Haden
bass, acoustic1937 - 2014
Unfortunately the preceding concert of eminent Danish saxophonist Lotte Anker, with German trombonist Johannes Bauer, young Danish bassist
Adam Pultz Melbye
bassb.1981
Day 3: July 14
The final day's first meeting was with pianist Simon Toldam, having met him earlier as member of the Han Bennink Trio. He spoke of his new trio album. Sunshine Sunshine or Green as Grass, with Nils Davidsen on bass and Knut Finsrud on drums, released on ILK as a two-LP set (as well as on CD), with a remarkably designed black sleeve. Toldam touched on questions such as his song-driven nature, recording locations and procedures, the physical surroundings of music-making, norms and expectations over music-making for real audiences, trust among fellow musician and over-accessing the possibility to cross musical universes freely, together with certain fellow musicians.
Next, Carsten Dahl—who, the day before, performed with Palle Mikkelborg at Statens Museum For Kunst. Dahl, known for his collaborations with
Arild Andersen
bass, acousticb.1945
Alex Riel
drumsb.1940
Ed Thigpen
drums1930 - 2010
Stefan Pasborg
drumsb.1974
In a short span of time he spoke about the making of Dreamchild, touched upon the repercussions of bright and dark life experiences on music, memory and childhood imagination, the effects of surrounding sounds, bird songs and the breaking down/rebuilding of the big perfected sound machine of the modern piano.
The day ended with two different trios at the ILK venue: the Simon Toldam Trio and a trio featuring guitarist
Mark Solborg
guitarLotte Anker
saxophoneb.1958
Piero Bittolo Bon
saxophone, altoIn the case of the Toldam/Davidsen/Bruun trio, it was a question of which path was taken when and by which member. There was no dominance or dependence to sense amongst their interplay. Their modus operandi, albeit serious, is understated rather than overstated. On a firm musical ground of their own they set out, alert and keen, on undiscovered, unexplored elements and passages. Subdued or enthusiastically the trio remained playful all throughout, with an audience staying, eager and receptive, until the very end.
Guitarist Solborg is clearly an ensemble-oriented musician, never dominating with overpowering or busy guitar sounds. He regularly uses his guitar in a percussive as well as semi-acoustic fashion. It gave a lot of space to Anker and especially Quinteros, who produced piercing and edgy sounds. The ever agile Bruun made it all sound stronger and kept everybody to the basics. Solborg was a fine player capable of accumulating rich layers of impacting sound.
Passing by the Copenhagen Jazz House on the way back to the hotel, there was the chance to take a glimpse of
Tim Berne
saxophone, altob.1954
The festival put a rich and vibrant variety of music on the map and offered Copenhagen musicians great possibilities for exposure, which was a very good thing. It also raised the question of what is going on and happening during the other 355 days of the year in Copenhagen? Is music going on at all these places or even a considerable number of them? Are all these musicians playing there regularly? Does the festival mirror, to a certain extent, the real situation? Copenhagen musicians have to cope with similar problems as their colleagues in London, Oslo, Vienna or Amsterdam, but they have some special anchors on which to rely. The festival followed a multilateral proactive strategy by building alliances first with Berlin, London and Rochester. It was a complex process that provided opportunities for musicians—but no guarantees.
It would be premature to draw a conclusion or to report clear trends. Danish jazz has redefined its traditional American connections and built up new North American musical relationship of its own kind. It has also developed its very own style-independent openness and flexibility that helps to shape new independent sonic contours. Sound exploration apparently plays an important role in the creative process, together with its very own approach to density reduction and gaining clarity.
Photo Credit
All Photos: Henning Bolte
Tags
Live Reviews
Henning Bolte
Denmark
Copenhagen
Terence Blanchard
Richard Bona
Chick Corea
Bill Frisell
charles lloyd
Marcus Miller
David Murray
Jakob Bro
Thomas Morgan
Jon Christensen
Chris Speed
Emanuele Maniscalco
Ivar Hedén
S?ren Gemmer
Peter Bruun
Simon Toldam
Django Bates
Samuel Blaser
Marc Ducret
Han Bennink
Jonas Westergaard
Kresten Osgood
Anders Banke
Jacob Anderskov
Jesper L?vdal
Lotte Anker
Stefan Pasborg
Stephan Sieben
Torben Snekkestad
Koichi Makigami
Gerald Cleaver
Phil Minton
Lars Andreas Haug
Mikko Innanen
Butch Lacy
Johannes Bauer
Axel Dorner
Jon Balke
Jeff Ballard
Paul Bley
Andrew Cyrille
Henry Grimes
EvanParker
Craig Taborn
John Tchicai
Cuong Vu
Roberto Pianca
Nicolas Masson
Nikolaj Hess
joe lovano
Tony Scherr
Kenny Wollesen
Pierre D?rge
George Garzone
Bob Rockwel
Eivind L?nning
Palle Mikkelborg
Carsten Dahl
Miles Davis
Hank Roberts
Eyvind Kang
Jenny Scheinman
Rudy Royston
Sun Ra
Charlie Haden
Adam Pultz Melbye
Arild Andersen
Alex Riel
Ed Thigpen
Jesper Zeuthen
Mark Solborg
Piero Bittolo Bon
Tim Berne
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