Creative Live

Stefan Pasborg is one of his generation’s most brilliant, inspiring and visionary musicians, and has within the last 20 years established himself as one of the most successful Danish instrumentalists.

Stefan Pasborg is one of his generation’s most brilliant, inspiring and visionary musicians, and has within the last 20 years established himself as one of the most successful Danish instrumentalists.

„When we walked out on stage it felt like a homecoming,” says Jakob Bro of this texturally spacious and emotionally charged live recording from Copenhagen, on which three of the defining protagonists of improvisation in Denmark, leading musicians from three generations of Danish jazz, come together. The concert, in February 2023, was particularly poignant since it marked a return to performance for trumpeter Palle Mikkelborg, who delivers some of his most thoughtful playing here. Repertoire, drawn from Jakob Bro’s Returnings and Gefion albums, is addressed in spontaneous and exploratory spirit, and transformed as Marilyn Mazur’s subtle percussion language of blossoming gongs and metals and rumbling drums blends with Bro’s drifting and rippling washes of sound. The music’s atmospheric qualities, as well its eruptive moments, are enhanced by the resonant acoustics of the Danish Radio Concert Hall.

The trio format has always been something of an ideal for Jan Lundgren. That particular buzz when communication between the musicians in a trio is direct, immediate and ever-present…when the trio keeps a constant sense of forward motion and development…when the players collectively remain open to the inspiration of every millisecond. These are the virtues which Lundgren sees as the recipe for the kind of openness, freedom, subtlety and excellence of a trio at its best.

When I started work on Geyser last autumn I had decided I was done composing music that reflected the pain of the pandemic. This new piece was to be instead a celebration – of music, its welcome return and that unique atmosphere created by musicians when they meet to perform. Its mood was to be predominantly joyful and optimistic, while its title was a metaphor for the music’s underlying rhythmic energy, unleashed intermittently in ecstatic outbursts – like explosions of water and steam from a pressurised geothermal spring. (This idea of tension, boiling under the surface, is a theme I return to in a lot in my music.)