Jakob Bro interview: “I quit school and made my own schedule – got up at 5.30 in the morning and practiced all day…”

Danish guitarist Jakob Bro’s new album Taking Turns isn’t quite as new as one might expect: produced in New York by the label’s éminence grise Manfred Eicher, it actually dates from 2014, at the start of Bro’s association with ECM Records; the line-up is stellar: Lee Konitz, Bill Frisell, Jason Moran, Thomas Morgan and Andrew Cyrille.

Still only 46, Jakob Bro has a pedigree that would be the envy of any jazz musician at the end of their career, never mind halfway through. Taking Turns is either his 18th or 19th album – he’s lost count. His breakthrough recording date was the first he did with Paul Motian for the latter’s 2004 Garden of Eden album. Since then he has worked extensively with the crème de la crème of ECM artists and fellow travellers on both sides of the Atlantic – Paul Bley, Tomasz Stańko, Palle Mikkelborg, Bill Frisell, Kurt Rosenwinkel, Kenny Wheeler… it’s a hell of a list.

Fourteen years of Bro’s recording career are painstakingly documented in the film Music for Black Pigeons, the soundtrack for which was released on ECM earlier in 2024. It’s a mesmerising production that offers a rare unfiltered glimpse into the actual processes of making music, as well as depicting the last days of Lee Konitz, who died in 2020 aged 92.

The release of Taking Turns was initially delayed because at the time it was recorded, Eicher was keen to present Bro in a trio setting with the focus on his guitar playing: “I had no idea whether ECM or my own label Loveland would eventually release the material.”

Although Eicher liked the music, he instead put Bro back in the studio with drummer Jon Christensen and bassist Thomas Morgan to record the album that was released as Gefion.

“I still wanted to record with Lee and the others and my idea was to just record and save it for later, so to speak. My trilogy with Konitz (Balladeering, Time and December Song) had just been nominated for the Nordic Council’s Music Prize and we were going to go on tour – Bill Frisell, Lee Konitz, Thomas Morgan and me – in Greenland, Norway, Faroe Islands and Denmark the year after. I wanted to go into the studio one last time with Lee and create some music for the future.”

The titles on Taking Turns have a distinctly geographical flavour – ‘Aarhus’, ‘Haiti’, ‘Pearl River’.Why all the place names? Well, for one, Aarhus is his home town in Denmark: “Pearl River is actually a supermarket in New York, in Chinatown. I used to go there a lot with Ben Street when we were furnishing the apartment we shared there. I did this album when I was on my way to Haiti to visit Jørgen Leth, who wrote the poem about my album with Konitz” (and directed Music for Black Pigeons). “At that time he lived half the year in Haiti. He was the Danish consul. Right after the session, I went out to Haiti. I wanted to name a song after that.”

Back then, apparently, the country was less dangerous than it is now, but still – for Bro – a different world.

So many albums, so much music. Does he find it easy to write?

“Yeah. Once I have the idea for the line–up it’s fairly simple for me. I’m very fortunate to have a lot of great musicians to write for during my career, so obviously that’s a big inspiration when I’m writing. The main thing is the balance between the written material and the improvised material. That’s the big question, always, for me.”

I point out that the music sounds so spontaneous and relaxed, it’s almost as if it hasn’t been written at all – as if, like Miles Davis sometimes – he’s walked into the studio with a piece of paper with two chords written on it.

“It’s super simple," he explains. "Like when I did ‘Evening Song’, which is a song on my first album with Konitz, it is just two chords, and they don’t even differ from each other very much. It’s like an E major and an F sharp minor. At that time I was super–nervous, I remember thinking, like – is that OK? And it turned out to be one of the pieces I enjoyed listening to the most, of all my songs.”

So how does he write?

“A lot of my identity in writing came from working with Paul Motian and his band for many years, seeing him arrange his songs for different people, seeing him give freedom to people. That was a period in my life when I was working fast, trying to find my own voice. I was playing Paul’s songs and writing my own at the same time, and for a while there was a clear resemblance between the two worlds, but slowly they evolved into being more me, I think – more from the Nordic part of the world. Different natural surroundings.”

One might be forgiven for thinking that everything that can be done with a guitar has been done. But Bro is an innovator and an inspiration to others, happy to explore electronica via loop pedals and other effects. He agrees with my predictable descriptions of his music overall as ‘spacious’ and ‘abstract’: “I spend a lot of time singing. I was playing melodies from my guitar, finding chords and then singing, finding the core of the pieces. I don’t even consider it writing, it’s more about digging these songs out of the ground. They already exist, in a way, they just need to be polished.”

How did such a meteoric career happen so young? It turns out his dad was a teacher who loved music, and ran an amateur big band.

“Sometimes I don’t understand it either. My father connected me with Louis Armstrong. I played trumpet in his big band when I was really young… I played with Charles Lloyd this summer, and I was hanging out with Larry Grenadier, and I started thinking about when I was a kid, listening to Brad Mehldau with Larry and Jorge (Rossy), and here I am 25 years later, and I’m close friends with Larry, and it’s absolutely surreal.”

Bro started playing guitar aged 10 or 11. He thinks his rapid elevation at a young age was a result of a key decision he made. When still young he helped his father by helping kids learn to play songs by Rage Against the Machine or The Beatles.

“My father didn’t have any interest in that, so I taught these older kids these pieces, which was great, because it meant I wouldn’t get bullied at school. When I was 15 I came home from one of these classes, and said to my father, ‘If I know I want to become a musician, why don’t I just quit school now, and just start getting serious?’”

His father was equivocal but his mother said, ‘Don’t do it!’ “But something in me went stubborn, and I was like, OK, I’m gonna do it. So I quit school and made my own schedule – got up at 5.30 in the morning and practiced all day. I was accepted into the Royal Academy of Music in Aarhus when I was 17. Before going to school I had already practised for three hours. A schedule for me could be – 5:45am: listen to Nina Simone for 15 minutes; 6:00am – check out a Dexter Gordon solo; 6:30am – practise ear training. So I had these routines, and I was in school for one year.

“Before going back to school for the second year I met Michael Brecker, Danilo Pérez, John Abercrombie and Kurt Rosenwinkel. They were all in Denmark, and they all heard me play, and they all came up to me and said, ‘You should come to the US’.

“Rosenwinkel I met because he was on tour with Brian Blade at that time. So he came to Aarhus, and I was playing at the same festival with a trio. I remember we were playing ’26–2’ by Coltrane, and all of a sudden after my solo this guy comes up and says, ‘Can I play a solo?’ And I’m like, I don’t know who it is, but I tell him, ‘OK’, I give him my guitar, and he plays a beautiful solo. And afterwards we go together to a jam session, and he plays ‘How Insensitive’. And I’m like, who is this guy? Like, it’s amazing. And it was Kurt, and he said he loved my playing, and he sent me a letter afterwards, and told me to come to New York and hang out with him. And that was a big motivation for me.

“A few weeks later I went to this summer Session – it’s like a seminar we have here in Denmark. So many great musicians come as instructors, and professional musicians are there as students. We’ve had Chick Corea, we’ve had Stan Getz and Paul Bley and Roy Haynes and Hermeto Pascal. I directed that course myself a few years ago. But anyway, I came as a student that same summer, and Danilo was there, Abercrombie and Michael Brecker was there. After the seminar, all the students are playing a concert for each other, and afterwords those guys cornered me, and they were like – you have to come to the US. You should study in Boston or New York.

“So those experiences over the summer made me say, 'OK I’m gonna quit the conservatory in Denmark and I’m gonna go to the US instead'. I got a scholarship for Berklee. After six months I wanted to go to New York, so I went back home to Copenhagen and applied for a scholarship to the New School... and then I went to New York. And that was the starting point for all the stuff that happened later.”

Jakob Bro gets invited to play at festivals all over Europe and beyond. He joins Arve Henriksen, Jesper Zeuthen and Marilyn Mazur on tour in Denmark through to the end of February, featuring material from the 2023 album Strands. In November, he went to Tokyo with two of his long-time collaborators Anders Christensen and Jorge Rossy, who played on his album dedicated to Paul Motian, Once Around The Room. In February 2025 he repeats the exercise at the Village Vanguard in New York, this time with the addition of Joe Lovano, Larry Grenadier, Thomas Morgan and Joey Baron. He also featured at the 2024 Cork Jazz Festival in Ireland.

Yet for some reason the UK rarely seems to feature in his schedule. He remembers once playing a few nights at Ronnie Scott’s (and a date at Cheltenham Jazz Festival – Ed) with Konitz, Linda May Han Oh, Jorge Rossy and Dave Douglas: “At that time Lee was also starting to sing, so it was a little bit tricky at times because he wanted Dave to sing and Dave wanted to play trumpet, so it was a bit up and down… I remember one thing that was funny. I was backstage with Lee between sets, and they put Charlie Parker on over the speakers, and Konitz is listening to it, and Parker was playing ‘Cherokee’, and Konitz is grumpy as hell and he’s like, ‘That’s supposed to be hip??’ I just cracked up.”

Given his extraordinary musical pedigree and sheer creativity as a unique guitar stylist, it’s high time we saw a lot more of Jakob Bro on these shores. Come on UK bookers – you know what to do!