If jazz represents the pinnacle of emotion sophistication in improvised music, at what point will it dissolve and re-appear as it’s diametric opposite? Can fragments of improvisation be registered, ‘felt’ to be bytes of information, capable of being copied, repeated or altered? Can the original spark of inspiration be distorted, re-inspired after the fact? Why not play the ‘jazz’ trumpet as an electronic-music producer? As if one’s performance is constantly being manipulated and fragmented from outside of the improvisational moment.
If electronic music is seen as fixed and unmutable, repetitive and without emotion, at what point can we experience it as being created under conditions of extreme uncertainty, repetition happening only purely by chance out of a chaotic, improvisational disorder? Why not create electronic music as if on stage in a jazz club? Constantly forgetting everything one has learnt only to rediscover it at the perfect moment. In a sense, jazz has always been electronic, and electronic has always been jazz. We want to celebrate that fact. It’s that simple.
‘Simple’ is an album born of a very special meeting. Håkan and myself shared an atmosphere of trust and exploration from the very beginning, and each session flowed in a way which was beautifully natural. We also had a fascination with each other’s skills of improvisation, and this music truly is a celebration of zen-like spontanaeity.
But it is also more than that. For the first time as a ‘jazz’ improviser, I felt that there was a context within which I could express myself freely. Håkan’s productions created a musical landscape of fragility, cool excitement and an understated funkiness that encouraged the quiet, fragmented, poignantly humorous side of my trumpet playing.
I feel that we have stumbled onto something quite new. A deconstruction of jazz, an amplification of it’s imperfections.A blurring of the line between digital and analogue.
A projection of emotional sophistication into a realm of infinitely subtle fragments, minute bytes of expression.
Alex van Heerden, Tulbagh, South Africa
Alex Van Heerden is the most musical person I’ve ever met during my fifteen years as a producer. He is made of music and he can make anything sound beautiful. When we work together it’s very rarely that Alex makes a second take of anything. For me, being a computer musician with endless possibilities to change, improve and manipulate, it has been a musical trip where I’ve discovered the place in me where music comes from. And the title track of the album Simple suggests precisely that. Music, at its best, can reflect the eternal questions of our existence, or even a glimpse of the Devine.
The title track is also sung in three languages simultaneously ; English, Afrikaans and Swedish. In addition to that some of the track tittles are in San, the ancient clicky South African language, only spoken by two living people in South Africa. today. This is to suggest that if the differences between these languages can dissolve so beautifully in the music, so can the problems we all think we carry. If we live our life from the place where music comes from.
It’s simple. But not easy.
Håkan Lidbo, Stockholm, Sweden
Live at Public Service festival in Copenhagen 2007: