Palle Mikkelborg, Jakob Bro, Marilyn Mazur | "Strands"

“When we walked out on stage it felt like a homecoming,” says guitarist Jakob Bro of Strands, 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 characteristically thoughtful playing here, always in service of the group context.

Repertoire - primarily by Bro but also including Mikkelborg’s piece “Youth” as well as “Returnings," co-written by Palle and Jakob - is addressed in spontaneous and exploratory spirit. Material is gently transformed and reinvented as Marilyn Mazur’s subtle percussion language of blossoming gongs, bowed 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.

Reviewing the concert for Nordic music magazine GAFFA, Ivan Rod wrote, “A little hour in the company of Mikkelborg, Mazur and Bro and the world had changed. Familiar frameworks had shifted through obvious moments of beauty and lingering calm."

Jakob Bro and Palle Mikkelborg, friends for many years, had long discussed possibilities of collaboration in diverse idioms. They began to play regularly together a decade ago. Improvisations with Jon Christensen and Thomas Morgan set some directions in motion that led eventually to the Returnings album of 2018. Marilyn Mazur took over the percussion role in 2020: “It seemed a natural extension of the music, which has continued to develop since then,” says Jakob. Of its constantly changing nature, he adds: "There is air in the music, great freedom and a shared desire to create something that cannot necessarily be explained, but felt."

“It’s a search for meaning,” says Mikkelborg of his life’s work as an improviser in Jørgen Leth and Andreas Koefed’s Jakob Bro documentary Music for Black Pigeons, a film currently touring the festivals. “Is there a meaning and if there is, can I be a part of it? And sometimes I’m reminded that there is.”

Marilyn Mazur (born in 1955) and Palle Mikkelborg (born 1941) have considerable musical history together. Marilyn’s contribution to Palle’s large-scale composition Aura, dedicated to and featuring Miles Davis, led to Mazur playing in Miles’s band in the mid-1980s.

Both Mazur and Mikkelborg have recorded often for ECM, Palle’s discography including five albums with Terje Rypdal, among them the late '70s classics Waves and Descendre. He can also be heard on recordings with Edward Vesala, Gary Peacock, Dino Saluzzi and Charlie Haden, and Shankar. Mazur has led ensembles on recordings including Small Labyrinths and Celestial Circle, and appeared on recordings with Jan Garbarek, Jon Balke, Eberhard Weber and Ketil Bjørnstad. Elixir, an album of percussion solos and duos with Jan Garbarek, followed 14 years as a member of the saxophonist’s group. Garbarek once compared Mazur’s playing to the movement of wind through trees, still a potent image for the fluidity and persuasive insistence of her sound.

Jakob Bro (born 1978) was first heard on ECM in the bands of Paul Motian and Tomasz Stanko on Garden of Eden and Dark Eyes. His albums as a leader have brought together improvisers of strikingly different background and experience. The scope of the music continues to widen, as evidenced on recent releases including Uma Elmo, a set of pellucid watercolours generated with Arve Henriksen and Jorge Rossy and the more outgoing Once Around The Room on which Bro and saxophonist Joe Lovano pay tribute to Paul Motian. Common to all these projects is Bro’s conviction that “the music has to breathe. It’s important that a kind of organic conversation is taking place.” Describing Uma Elmo for his Blue Moment blog, Richard Williams noted that Bro’s pieces can be “subtle in effect and gradual in momentum, but employing a surprisingly wide dynamic and emotional range. Exquisite but never effete, they invite the musicians to explore their individual instrumental vocabularies as part of a collective creation.”