I first tuned in to Jazz when I was around 12 and my father took me to hear Count Basie at the Tivoli Gardens Concert Hall. Something about that sound appealed just as much to this young boy as soccer and soda pops, and when everyone had to bring some music for a school party later that year, I brought an Errol Garner record eager to show everyone what real music was about. My friends were not amused; particularly not the female guests, so when the lights when out and people started to slow dance, I retreated to a corner with my stale Coke. This bitter lesson taught me to hide my Sinatra albums behind the Jimi Hendrix albums whenever I had girls over from then on.
In high school my very young and very attractive music teacher tried to arouse my interest in classical music and opera in particular. For a long time she worked hard to make me enrol at the opera academy, but the discipline and privations of such a goal-oriented career frightened me and I wound up at the university where I studied Danish and English for eight years and more or less dropped practising music. It was here I first got an interest in language, however hard the institution tried to drown it in muddy water.When I left the university, I happened to join a cover band that needed a singer, and over the next ten years I sang in both my own and other bands and got quite a good response from several record companies, one of which went bankrupt after it had accepted a handful of my songs. Early on in my band career I began taking singing lessons with some of the first trained song teachers from the Rhythmic Academy of Music and here I ran into Jazz once again. From the end of the nineties I got serious with Jazz and attended the acclaimed Brandbjerg Jazz Workshop, first as a student and later on as a teacher, and during all these years I have, as the sole male vocalist, tried to give this strange minority a voice. I still go there every summer even though today it’s called the Engelsholm Workshop, and since no one has torn the mike away from me yet, I’m inclined to think my project a success, and indeed my debut album did get quite a warm welcome. In the new year we’re going to live it up on tour, and I also have a ballads album and a couple of other projects in the melting pot.
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