BALLADEER
Jakob Bro put together a dream team with Bill Frisell, Ben Street and Paul Motian and Lee Konitz added on as the trump card. They don’t play standard ballads, but original fluid, vibrant music that sounds like nothing else around.
By Simon Christensen
New York, 1949. Alto saxophonist Lee Konitz is part of the nine-piece Miles Davis band that records BIRTH OF COOL, starting cool jazz. New York, September 2008. Lee Konitz is back in the studio, this time the composer isn’t Davis, but Jakob Bro. Lee Konitz chooses the name of the project: BALLADEERING. He has no other word for Jakob Bro’s signature: minimalism, characteristic small tunes, the hidden solos, and the instruments weaving in and out of each other, and yet winding up painting a picture. —Small melodies. I can’t believe you can get away with it, Lee Konitz says matter-of- factly in the documentary WEIGHTLESS – A RECORDING SESSION WITH JAKOB BRO, that follows the conception of the music and was released simultaneously with the album. —He thinks in solos, when he writes tunes, and it almost can’t get complicated enough. I’m the opposite. I try to cut to the bone. I sing and try phrasing the tunes while I write the music. Repeat it a hundred times, trying to find out, how I want it to sound. Every tune has its own state of mind. As soon as we’ve counted in the music, we are exactly where we are supposed to be, says Jakob Bro.
He recalls the recordings with bright eyes. He stops in the middle of his sentences, smiles. Pause. His eyes flicker towards the ceiling. When Jakob Bro thinks back, it’s as if he’s somewhere else altogether. —It was cool. Especially Lee Konitz, whom I’d never played with before. You can’t really put it in words. You learn a lot. They’ve played with all the giants. I try to remember that and be grateful, he says.
Konitz is 82 years old. Bro is 31. His mentor, the drummer Paul Motian, is 78. —Do you forget your age when you are with them? —Yes, Jakob Bro smiles. —When you are with these really old guys, obviously you feel immense respect. When we play, I try not to screw anything up. I don’t think about it when we’re playing. But for just a short moment, the thought shoots through my head.
The discussions in the studio are good-humored. Particularly Paul Motian jokes around in a dedicated voice. Musically this is a whole different level. Jakob Bro has written small themes, hand-written notations, but most of the communication is in unsaid things. —The material was more transparent than usual, that way I hoped to get people to open up more. All the tunes are built around a pretty simple melody and some not very hard chords, which meant that almost always, we got them down in the first or second take. Otherwise it loses the magic, explains the Aarhus-born guitarist. —Lee Konitz makes all the difference. I love the way all the musicians sound on this record, and especially how Lee sings on top of it all. He interprets what he hears the rest of us playing in the moment.
Milestones Slowly, Jakob Bro has built an international network based in New York. That’s how he managed to gather this star line-up. Three times. In the long run it is all about recommendations and favors in jazz circles. Although Jakob Bro is a humble soloist, as a bandleader and career person, he looks with ambitious eyes at whatever possibilities that open. —I went over there to study at New School in 2000-2001 with the intangible hope of someday playing with the group of young musicians I admired and was inspired by. I went to countless concerts at the Village Vanguard, took lessons from Chris Creek and got to know Ben Street. But it’s a long way from there to playing with them. I returned to Denmark, and then suddenly out of the blue, I got a job with Paul Motian for a European tour in 2002, because he needed a guitarist, he explains.
At the time, Kurt Rosenwinkel, Chris Cheek and the young Danish bassist, Anders Christensen, played in the band. Paul Motian became Jakob Bro’s ticket to that whole scene. —The same sort of thing happened when I moved from Aarhus to Copenhagen. I listened to people like Jakob Dinesen and Jeppe Gram, and I wanted to be a part of that scene so much, that it almost happened all by itself, continues Bro.
—You make it sound coincidental? —Yes, without being pushy. Networks come slowly. It’s like rings in the water.
Later, Bro’s close friend, Ben Street, the aesthetic, joined Motian’s band. —I went to New York in 2007 to record PEARL RIVER with Ben Street, Chris Cheek, Mark Turner and Paul Motian. We had two days in the studio, and I just thought, wow, if I only had twice as much material.
That’s why he returned to the Avatar Studios with all of 25 tunes and an enlarged dream team including Jesper Zeuthen, Andrew D’Angelo, Kurt Rosenwinkel and not least Bill Frisell, whom Bro had met, because he played in Motian’s other band. They recorded three THE STARS ARE ALL NEW SONGS-albums, of which only one has yet been released – on Bro’s own independent label, Loveland Records. In September 2008 he repeated the ambitious maneuver with producer James Farber, this time with Lee Konitz and 12 new compositions. The rest is history. —You ask Lee Konitz to play on an album with Ben Street, Paul Motian and Bill Frisell. There is no chance of him being in anything but a perfect setting, so he says yes. That’s the way things have always worked with everything I’ve done. And then I’ve gotten as much out of it as I could.
At this time, Jakob Bro is on a world tour with Tomasz Stanko Quintet.
Weightless Director Sune Blicher followed Jakob Bro with his camera from idea to album. The author, journalist and movie director Jørgen leth was in the studio, and he wrote his personal impressions for the movie WEIGHTLESS. —Why a film? Your media is music. —The movie is an attempt to show how music is created. Music is one thing. How great artists actually are, is something entirely different. —I was really nervous about the atmosphere. I’d never met Lee Konitz, before he walked through the studio door. Obviously it doesn’t add to the recording, that there are photographers and guests in the studio. But once Jørgen Leth wrote down his experiences, his presence there really made sense to me.
Voices Jacob Bro is called the humble soloist. His expression varies throughout his discography, and on some albums, you can hardly hear the guitar, the balladeer that doesn’t attract attention in the overall sound. —I always recorded for the pleasure of it. I have the sound production in mind, even when I write the tunes, which is why I enjoy writing for particular musicians. I didn’t call these people to create a setting for myself.
—Where does it come from, the quiet ballads and the absence of flashy solos? —When I started out, there was no doubt that Coltrane had all that. Later I listened to vocal music like Nick Drake and Neil Young, and their melodies are much more simple. That is clearly reflected in my music. I try to find a voice in for instance a horn or a guitar. —All jazz musicians have a voice. I’m looking for people, who can carry these simple melodies and make them non-banal. I love jazz musicians like Chet Baker and Lester Young, Miles Davis or Jobim. They work around the same things as Neil Young. I don’t think of a particular run or a difficult melody. I want to go behind all that and find the man behind the melody. —I am sure that Bill, Lee and Paul are closer to their own language than I am. It doesn’t necessarily mean playing faster or more abstract. My real privilege is, that I have been given the opportunity of trying some things at a young age, and that means I can relax in regard to certain things, says Jakob Bro in closing.