Little North

Copenhagen is not the jazz capitol of the world. It is a nice, hyggelig but not unimportant provincial city in the jazz world. In the sixties and seventies Stockholm, Amsterdam and Copenhagen was buzzing with great American musicians, and I and the girls go to Ben Webster's grave every spring to put some flowers on it as he lived here his last years.

Every summer the Copenhagen Jazz Festival has a lot of great names, but this evening my wife and I choose a local and very young piano trio whose records we have enjoyed a lot.

It was steaming hot (my comfort limit is 22°C), but they really played beautifully and I had a very cold beer. Same sound and tight, concentrated improvisations as we knew from the records I bought on Bandcamp. In the second set there was one, very long, very complicated ... erhm ... movement, where I had to whisper to my wife that it probably was entitled, "Lost in the Northern Jazzmark", but all in all a killer concert by some incredible, but still humble young musicians, who couldn't hide their surprise that the concert had been sold out. (The fate of the jazz-man and -woman who has played for empty night clubs and uninterested party people their whole life).

Their sound is both new and still very traditional. There is a certain sound of Nordic jazz and these blokes has both Niels Henning Ørsted-Pedersen and Jan Johansson in them while also doing all sorts of new things. Well, it was great!

Here's some of their studio recordings. The concert was just as concentrated and perfectly sounding.