In 2002 Jakob Bro made a call that changed his life. The guitarist and composer, who was 24 at the time, had been asked to phone Paul Motian, a drummer who had made his name in the pioneering Bill Evans piano trio of the early 1960s, been a key member of Keith Jarrett’s forward-thinking 1970s American quartet, and worked with musicians whom Bro hugely admired, including the saxophonists Lee Konitz and Charles Lloyd. Motian was not just one of the most important and highly respected musicians in modern jazz; he was also Bro’s creative inspiration and guiding light. And he was asking him to join his band.
“It was the most surreal thing I’ve ever experienced, like I was calling someone from a different planet, and the absolute highlight of my musical life, of course,” says Bro, who is Danish, from his home in Copenhagen. “Paul was a bridge to the history of the music – he’d played with [Thelonious] Monk, and Billie Holiday had kissed his hand. And he believed in me when I was so young ... I mean, who was I, and is this a dream I’m living? Most of my career I owe to that one conversation. Paul Motian opened all these doors.”
It was through Motian’s imprimatur that Jakob Bro – his first name is pronounced “YAH-kub” – would go on to tour with the drummer’s celebrated groups; first play at the most famous jazz club in the world, the Village Vanguard, in New York; appear on the estimable German label ECM for the first time, on Motian’s 2006 album Garden of Eden; and, through ECM’s founder and creative force, Manfred Eicher, tour and record with the nonpareil Polish trumpeter Tomasz Stańko and, in 2015, make his own ECM debut as leader. For Bro, who is in Ireland next week to play at Cork Jazz Festival, Motian could not have been bigger.
The drummer was also a strong influence on the direction of Bro’s compositions and music. Having studied at the Royal Danish Academy of Music from the age of 17, the prestigious Berklee College of Music, in Boston, for one semester, and the progressive New School in New York City for a year, Bro had by his mid-20s worked hard and was well versed in all aspects of the jazz tradition, particularly the prevailing current of post-bop, a form capacious enough to embrace hard bop, modal jazz, the avant-garde and more.
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Motian’s own music, in contrast, had gradually become at once more spare and more free: while the melodies approached an almost folk-like simplicity, the harmonic structures, and the drummer’s very open approach to rhythm and time, allowed for a high degree of both personal expression and group improvisation. “After many years I realised that less is more,” Motian once said. “And as I get older I think even more less adds up to even more.”
This postmodern formula, one in which notions of old and new, straight and free, clear and complex are themselves in dynamic flux, would become a cornerstone of Bro’s very singular approach to music-making – even, and especially, after Motian died, in 2011. “Playing with Paul, and spending time with him, are things I will always be learning from,” Bro says. “Even though he’s not here any more I want to keep showing him that he made the right decision with that first phone call.”
Bro grew up in Risskov, an affluent beachside suburb of Aarhus, Denmark’s second city. His parents were teachers: his mother worked with children with mental and physical disabilities, often using music; his jazz-loving father taught maths, gymnastics and music and, in his spare time, ran the school big band – Jakob grew up with a music room at home that contained all the ensemble’s instruments, from trombones to tambourines.
“My parents thought we were supposed to play an instrument, so my older sister played saxophone, my younger brother played drums and, like my father, I played trumpet,” Bro says. “As well as introducing me to the whole history of jazz, my father showed me music from different parts of the world, and I played carols and Danish hymns on trumpet in church. All that music stays with you somehow; it’s a gift you can’t really explain.”
His broad musical education also included Bach, The Beatles, Kraftwerk, Arvo Pärt, singer-songwriters such as Neil Young, Nick Drake and Elliott Smith – and, at the age of 12, Jimi Hendrix’s groundbreaking 1970 live album Band of Gypsys. It was an epiphany, the consequences of which echoed in unexpected ways.
“I got all the Hendrix albums, and they made me want to play the guitar, and I joined a rock band and, of course, I loved the instrument,” he says. “But I was still playing the trumpet, and I loved other instrumentalists, like Miles [Davis], [John] Coltrane and Monk, and, really, the guitar wasn’t the obvious choice for me. I thought it was a little weird, the guitar often being the centre of everything. And that has formed my approach to playing music today. I don’t see the guitar as the main instrument in the band, and I genuinely don’t feel obligated to show people anything on my instrument. I see it more as providing soundscapes that other instruments can build upon.”
That wonderfully democratic approach to making music can be heard across the 19 albums Bro has released as leader, both on his own label, Loveland, and on ECM. Bro’s aesthetic is consciously anti-virtuosic – it’s about paying attention as much as playing, about listening in an extremely focused way, about getting inside the music, finding a connection to those playing it and forging a deep conversation. It requires a rare synergy of selflessness and self-worth. This may begin to explain why Bro is so highly regarded in both Europe and the United States, and has collaborated with such a stellar cast of creative musicians, from Palle Mikkelborg, Arve Henriksen and Marilyn Mazur to Joe Lovano, Bill Frisell and Mark Turner.
“I’m very much thinking in terms of composition when I’m improvising,” he says. “I’m not going to impose myself, and I never feel like I own the direction of the music. It usually goes its own way, if you let it, and that can be the source of great joy. That’s a very big part of my understanding of music.”
The results are often both lyrical and abstract, meditative and luminous; Bro is fond of contrasts. His limpid tone is occasionally tinged with atmospheric guitar effects and post-rock reverb and sustain, yet his unfussy melodies and unhurried music can seem so spare and understated that it’s often hard to say exactly why they work so well. There is a sense of space and weightlessness; very little seems to be going on. “Trying to put your finger on Jakob Bro’s guitar style can be like trying to describe the essence of air,” Steve Futterman wrote in the New Yorker.
Yet immerse yourself in his sound world and listen more closely, and all kinds of subtle details, textures, colours and moods emerge. Bro’s music is the equivalent of Rothko’s paintings, Mies van der Rohe’s buildings, Beckett’s plays and Carver’s short stories, as well as of Danish furniture and Japanese interior design – Bro is drawn to minimalism and restraint. (He also speaks Japanese.)
The overall effect – much like some of Bro’s favourite film-makers, Andrei Tarkovsky, David Lynch and Stanley Kubrick – is both absorbingly poetic and somewhat mysterious, even disorientating. “What I’m looking for in music is the unknown,” he has said. “I’m looking for that place where you can feel something, something that gives you goosebumps. Something is happening to you while you’re listening, but you don’t understand what it is.”
Irish audiences get a rare opportunity to experience that dichotomy first-hand this month when Bro appears in a trio with two American masters of clarity and implication: the double bassist Thomas Morgan and the drummer Joey Baron. On one level this is a standard electric-guitar trio. On another it is about as removed from the sometimes pyrotechnical posturing of that tradition as it’s possible to imagine. Is yet another paradigm shift required?
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“Well, yeah, I think, for me it requires an audience to be open, to not expect anything other than being taken on a journey,” Bro says. “I mean, this is the band that I’ve toured with the most, and I’ve really learned a lot from Joey and Thomas – my guitar playing, and my way of thinking about concerts, took a giant leap forward with them. But we haven’t played together for a long time. So, it’s very special. Even though I’ve never played in Cork, this is going to be a homecoming.”
The Jakob Bro Trio, featuring Joey Baron and Thomas Morgan, plays Triskel Christchurch, as part of Guinness Cork Jazz Festival, on Sunday, October 27th
Guinness Cork Jazz Festival 2024: What else to look out for
Guinness Cork Jazz Festival has a nomenclature problem. There is plainly little wrong with three of the words in the title of the annual jamboree by the Lee, but name it a jazz festival – rather than, as in the British jazz-and-beyond world, something more indefinite, such as Love Supreme or We Out Here – and some music fans may understandably have certain expectations. Which may not be fully matched by the inclusion this year of, for example, the Norwegian dance-music DJ and producer Todd Terje, the young Irish indie band The Academic and not one but three tribute acts, to Queen, Oasis and Fleetwood Mac. Jazz is a broad church, and genre lines are increasingly becoming blurred, but, as in recent years, some may justifiably cry “category error”.
Dig deep enough into the festival’s 2024 programme, however, and there are treasures to be found. As always, Triskel Arts Centre has a dynamic and diverse weekend of jazz gigs, all taking place in the soaring glory of its Christchurch space, from the acclaimed Danish master percussionist and global music innovator Marilyn Mazur (who also appears with her Special 4 quartet in Dún Laoghaire, Dublin and Donegal as part of a short Music Network tour); to a celebration of the music of Alice Coltrane, featuring the leading London-based Ukrainian harpist Alina Bzhezhinska; and two fascinating recitals by artists on the admired ECM label: the duo of the Hungarian classical guitarist Zsófia Boros and the Norwegian jazz saxophonist Trygve Seim; and a solo concert by the gifted Israeli pianist Nitai Hershkovits.
Over at Cork Opera House, despite the much-anticipated late-night Kamasi Washington concert being postponed because of the Los Angeles saxophonist sustaining a back injury, all eyes will be on the two quickly sold-out shows by perhaps the leading (and certainly most popular) singer in modern jazz, Gregory Porter; a series of Green Room gigs featuring leading Irish jazz musicians, including the duos of Christine Tobin and Phil Robson and Paul Dunlea and Cormac McCarthy; and a night of irresistible Cuban melodies and rhythms presented by the Buena Vista All Stars.
Those looking for similarly good times for their feet and soul should head to the Everyman for the infectious grooves of Seun Kuti, the youngest son of the Afrobeat icon Fela Kuti, and the veteran Senegalese Afro-Cuban dance band Orchestra Baobab, and to Cyprus Avenue for the spirited Chicago brotherhood the Hypnotic Brass Ensemble. Add the hip-hop trailblazers De La Soul, the Malian blues duo Amadou & Mariam, brass-band boat cruises and carousing concerts at the Metropole and you have all the fun of the famous October bank holiday weekend musical fair – Jazz or no.
Guinness Cork Jazz Festival takes place from Thursday, October 24th, to Monday, October 28th. Philip Watson presents a Listen Back session, to Bill Frisell’s album Good Dog, Happy Man, at Cork City Library at 11am on Wednesday, October 23rd
