(This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.)
LP: Hello, how are you?
Anders Koppel: I'm fine, how are you?
LP: I'm quite well, thank you.
Anders Koppel: It's good to be here.
LP: Oh, it's wonderful to have you. Where are you?
Anders Koppel: I'm on a little island north of Denmark, where we have our summer house. I have been here since I was a child, so actually, it feels like home. And of course, I live in Copenhagen, usually.
LP: Oh, that's wonderful. What's it like when you need to leave the island to go to a jazz festival or to do some work? Is it a chore to get back and forth?
Anders Koppel: No, actually, I work up here too. I compose, so I use the peacefulness to have new ideas. And it takes some time going to Copenhagen, seven hours.
LP: Wow.
Anders Koppel: I know. In America, yeah.
LP: I always think that the challenge when I speak with someone who has had the career longevity, the musical and artistic output, and just the range of musics that you've been involved with—I always find the challenge being how to rein it in. But I think a lot of your recent activity is actually making that easy for me because you have so much going on currently and even coming up later this year that I'm really excited to spend some time in the here and now with you.
Over the last couple of days, I've been very much immersed in Time Again. Just such a beautiful work. Something that struck me about it when I was able to give it a really close listen, as opposed to having it on while I was doing other things, was that the format itself—the trio format, as well as the way it was recorded—really lent itself to listening to your pedal work.
I guess I was going to use the word surprising. I don't mean that I'm surprised you're capable of it. Just so delicate, yet also prominent and propulsive. Could you tell me a little bit about your history with that instrument? Like coming up in a household that was so musically influenced, obviously, and with classical tradition and a composer father, just curious how you managed to find yourself seated at a B-3 and what that journey was like.
Anders Koppel: That's a long story. Of course, my father had a record collection of 78s from the thirties with Duke Ellington, Cab Calloway, Fletcher Henderson, and Art Tatum. And that was a big influence. I listened to the records over and over again when I was maybe fourteen or something like that. When I was a young guy, I had as birthday present Fats Waller playing the London Palladium Organ, and that was a revelation for me, because he played it not so much as jazz, but as symphonic jazz.
He played it like a symphony orchestra. And immediately I knew, that's what I want. I got a very cheap Italian Farfisa organ, and gradually I got another, smaller Hammond. And we started the group, me and my brother, who played the piano, The Savage Rose in sixty-seven. And around sixty-nine, I got the B-3.
At that time, we had reduced the group to a trio—me, my brother, and the vocalist. So I needed to play the bass, because we had no bass player. I got the B-3 with the two-octave pedal work, and I started practicing. I really loved playing the pedals, now you mention it. Because for me, the bass is maybe the heart of the music. It keeps everything together, and it points the direction.
Actually, it's the core of the music. So ever since then, I love playing the bass. That makes the instrument complete for me. Of course, I play with bass players from time to time. I play several times with Scott Cawley, for instance, and that's a whole different thing. That's wonderful as well. Maybe it liberates me because I don't have the duty of keeping everything together and the bass and so on. But for me, the instrument only completes with the bass.
And maybe the Fats Waller record also sort of inspired my way of playing the organ. Of course, I'm a big fan of Jimmy Smith and all of these great jazz organ players, but maybe I'm in a different direction. For me, it's some more symphonic thing.
LP: How does that contrast with a Jimmy Smith or a Groove Holmes? Like when you say symphonic, what does that imply versus what they're doing?
Anders Koppel: Maybe it implies a bit more curiosity in the sound because the Hammond organ can be like a flute, like a cello—it has so many different colors. And Jimmy Smith usually plays with one setting, more or less. I'm especially a big fan of his ballad playing because I think in his ballad playing, he's much more liberated in sounds.
LP: Yeah.
Anders Koppel: He listens to the sound in a whole different way in the up-tempo thing, which he, of course, masters fantastically, but his ballad playing is exquisite.
LP: It's really interesting to hear you say some of this because it's filling in some pieces for me as a listener. Again, to reference Time Again, there is an element to the playing—and part of it also is Brian Blade, just, he's such a soulful drummer and leaves so much space for interplay and dialogue.
I think another thing that struck me about the organ playing was, you know, the organ has a tendency to really cut through. It can hit a certain treble or it just has a shrillness to it that is actually a really neat attribute when you're soloing or comping, but there's more of a textural element here in what you're doing, and I think the piece that's falling in for me is this idea that you've played in a lot of smaller ensembles where the organ did have to be sort of a glue.
Anders Koppel: You know, I played in a trio called Bazaar for thirty-six years. Unfortunately, my two pals in the band have gone. That was the wind player playing bassoon, electrical bassoon, and clarinets, and then percussionists. And of course, that left me alone with harmony, with everything, actually.
And also, I played with Benjamin for many years, with a percussionist, who's unfortunately also gone now. But with Brian, we have been playing many times for several years. Actually, every time he was in Denmark, we have had some gigs. And of course, it's such a big inspiration to play with Brian, because he's a genius, wonderful musician, and such a wonderful man.
And the thing with Brian is, he is so easy to play with, because he catches everything you do, he justifies everything you do. But he never stresses that he hears everything. He films it, he makes everything natural. He develops music in a very organic way. That suits me, of course, well, as it does so many others.
LP: I love watching him play any time I can see him live. Just the physicality and sort of the way he moves the music and the instrument. It's incredible.
Anders Koppel: It's pure joy. He loves music so much. We had a very fantastic cooperation around the Mulberry Street Symphony, which is a big work—ninety minutes of music for a trio, namely Benjamin on alto sax, Scott Colley on bass, and Brian on drums, and symphony orchestra, which I composed especially for this trio. Brian doesn't play with a symphony orchestra every day, but in that situation, actually, I didn't write anything for him. I made him a transcript for piano of the orchestra parts, and he followed that, and he filled in as he knew the music inside out. That was very thoughtful, and then we made Time Again a couple of years, maybe a year after, and that's wonderful.
LP: It's funny, as you were speaking earlier, I was thinking about the first time I sat at a B-3 many, many years ago in a recording studio. And I remember thinking, how does one person do this? Like, it seems like it would take six people between the drawbars and the pedals and the stacked keyboards and the Leslie control. It's a daunting instrument. I'm curious. Is there still room to explore, or how do you think about mastery versus curiosity?
Anders Koppel: To me, it's no different than a drummer. The drummer has a bass drum, he has a snare, he has cymbals, he has toms, and so on. And for a real drummer, it's not drums, it's music. It's really one thing. And for me, the organ is one thing. And I don't think about the bass as such. It grows naturally from the music, you know?
LP: I think I'm curious about the idea that because it's such a potentially complex instrument in terms of combinations of elements that you can control, if you feel as though you've exhausted the possibilities or you've mastered the instrument, is there an excitement or a sense of opportunity that you can learn new things?
Anders Koppel: Always. Always. I mean, it's no different than the piano. Because the organ is such a rich instrument. But so is the piano. And there are seemingly not so many possibilities as such on a piano. But the possibilities are endless, even on a piano. Because once you get into the sound, the soulfulness of music, you don't think about possibilities—you just want to sing. You know what I mean? It's not a mystery out of it, but I really feel like that. And also, I will say that the sound possibilities are, of course, endless in a Hammond organ.
LP: Yeah.
Anders Koppel: And I find that from time to time, my focus shifts. I sort of discover new or old sounds that I have been into for some years, and wow, ah, this I want to use again. And so it's a continuous development, really.
LP: Did you spend much time either on record or just as a personal pursuit exploring synthesizers? Were synthesizers ever a big part of your creativity?
Anders Koppel: As a composer, yes, because for many years I made a lot of film music and also ballet music and music for theaters, and I used extensively synthesizers and samplers and so on. But I never took them on stage because it's a different thing. It's a part of composing, but not part of playing. For me, as a musician, I have the piano and I have the organ. I never had the urge to bring the synthesizer on stage, for some reason.
LP: So as a composer, it was a method for you to be able to hear, to emulate some of the sound or to hear, take what was in your head and hear it before you actually had the luxury of live musicians.
Anders Koppel: Yeah, sometimes, sometimes like that, but also just to discover new sounds, new inspiration, new textures and so on. And at that time in the eighties, when you played a synthesizer, you felt like you were part of a journey, a discovery journey. So we were already exploring new fields. Now maybe it's a different thing because everything has been discovered.
LP: I'm very curious about the musical relationship with Benjamin. It's funny to talk to you now because I spent some time with him about a year ago. And I'm realizing as we speak that there's a trait or multiple traits the two of you share in common. One is there's a lightness and a humor that you both seem to share while still being very serious about the music itself. You used the word earlier, soulfulness or soul and soulful. I feel and hear that element in his music as well and in talking with him. In fact, it might be the dominant word outside of humor that came up for me when I left my conversation with him. I know it's a bit of an ineffable quality—they're both emotional resonances, humor and soul. And I'm curious, do you have a sense how you came into having that personality? You know, was it from having an artistic family or growing up with an artistic parent? What is this sense of heart that you have?
Anders Koppel: Yeah, that's a big question. When I look back on my life, I know I got a lot from my father, because for him, music was a very serious matter. If you devoted yourself to music, there were no shortcuts. You really had to go all the way. Either you were a composer or a pianist—he was himself both a pianist and composer.
And so from him I learned, I think, to work hard, which Benjamin, I think, maybe has learned from me. The basis of what you talk about, the lightness, the humor, the soul, and so on, comes from devoting your life to music and it doesn't come free. If you want to reach out to other people, if you want to express your own soul, you have to master your instrument.
Benjamin is really a virtuoso. I mean, he really can play anything. I know he works hard, and I know I work hard. Also as a composer, because that's a machinery too. You have to oil and maintain and develop, you know. So the basis I learned from my father, but also I learned from my relationship with the musicians I worked with, of course, all the time from Benjamin, because we have been playing together ever since he was young, actually. When he was a little boy, when the rest of the family were out of the house, we made songs together, which we recorded in the studio.
And he wrote the lyrics and the tunes, and he had a wonderful singing voice when he was a child, almost a bit like Stevie Wonder as a boy—he had that kind of voice. So we made a lot of music together, even when he was six, and we just, actually, we just continued. Then he played drums, and then he took up saxophone, and when he took up saxophone, I took up the guitar, because I thought, if he could learn a new instrument, I can learn a new instrument.
So I began studying guitar, and three weeks after, we went on a tour of Danish cafes and so on, playing together, guitar and sax.
LP: Oh my goodness, that's beautiful.
Anders Koppel: And we have been playing together ever since. Part of our relationship is, of course, to give each other great opportunities. Because he asked me, would you like to do this and that? And I say, yeah, of course. And I've written five saxophone concertos for him, concertos for saxophone and symphony orchestra. So we give each other opportunities and new ways of expression.
LP: While we're in this realm of relationships, something that I remember from my conversation with Benjamin was him talking about the relationship that he and his family have with Brian and Brian's family and just the closeness and, you know, they stay with each other. And obviously, you know, when they're gigging, they're traveling together as musicians do. I'm always curious, especially when it's with jazz musicians or creative music musicians who often don't necessarily get to spend a lot of time together before they record and play. You know, they have to come together, rehearse and then do it, or sometimes not even rehearse.
Anders Koppel: Yeah, I know.
LP: And I'm so interested in the contrast between people that are able and ensembles that are able to either stay together for a long time or reconvene periodically—basically they get to have an ongoing relationship and dialogue—versus one-off things that come together for maybe some sessions and some dates and then that's it. They're both so interesting in those dynamics, but I'm curious about the specifics of the melding of the artistic and the family. I hear this a lot about the Everly Brothers or the Louvin Brothers. People would talk about how the brothers' voices melded, or even the Beach Boys. You know, it seems to be a unique aspect of the vocal harmony when it's a brotherly or a familial bond. Is there an analog to that amongst instrumentalist musicians in terms of a family connection, or is that laying too much into it?
Anders Koppel: No, I don't think we talked about it, but I know there is such a thing, because I know his—I know Benjamin's sound, I know his intentions, I know his ways, as he does with mine, so we know ahead of what is happening, where he's heading.
But also, I want to say that the whole family thing, also with players like Brian—for instance, another very good friend of ours, Kenny Werner, the pianist, we have such a wonderful relationship and have had for years. I have made two albums with him. For me, the relationship outside of the music is a wonderful entrance to the music. If you're brothers or fathers and sons or whatever, maybe there's a lot of things that are easier if you look at one another. Actually, to say it as it is, there's a way of making music, I think.
LP: Yeah.
Anders Koppel: You know, the day before we made Time Again, recorded in one day in studio, the day before me and my wife had our golden anniversary—in America too, fifty years of marriage.
LP: Wow.
Anders Koppel: And we had a big party, and Brian and his wife, Laura, were there. And just to show you that when we have the opportunity, they are part of the family. So when we went into the studio next day, we went to the studio with a feeling of happiness because we had this wonderful party inside of us, and so the music became alive and everything was really sweet. Every take on the record is a first take. We never went back and took it again.
LP: That's incredible. And it saves on studio time.
Anders Koppel: Yeah, yeah. I think we had eighty minutes of music or something. Not everything was on the album.
LP: Did you share any kind of artistic life with your own father?
Anders Koppel: Yes, of course. When I was a child, I played piano, of course. Later on, I played clarinets, and so he actually—I also, when I was very small, played recorder, and he wrote several pieces for me and him for recorder and piano. Later on, he wrote for clarinet and piano, which we played in concerts, and I was maybe fourteen, fifteen years old. We made a lot of things together, so we had a very strong artistic relationship, too.
And he was always very interested in what I was into, what did I listen to? And he wanted to—when I listened to Jimi Hendrix, for instance—he was always interested in what I was into and vice versa, of course.
LP: What did he think of that? Contemporary music. Did he like it? Did he find things that resonated for him?
Anders Koppel: As all, I think, true musicians, he didn't use the labels. You know, for him, it was music, and with the group that me and my brother, The Savage Rose, which I was maybe seventeen, eighteen when we made that band. It was a huge success from the start on, and it was very interesting because it was a rock band, but it was a different kind of rock band, because we carried the classical music with us, of course.
It was a bit different harmonies, it was a different way of thinking music, and he understood that, of course. I only remember that he was very interested in all the new things coming out. Dylan, when I went into a Bob Dylan period, you know, he wondered what is it you are so occupied with? And he listened to it and The Band and, you know, all of that.
LP: That's amazing. Do you share that attribute? Do you find that you have a musical curiosity about, not even necessarily pop music, but do you still listen and consume newer music? Or do you have a canon that you revisit repeatedly? Like sort of how do you think about the ever-expanding world of music?
Anders Koppel: Yeah, you know, when I turned fifty, I stopped making film music, ballet music, and all of that. I wanted to concentrate on making scores, you know, for symphony orchestras, string quartets, everything which really inspired me. When I started doing that, I, of course, found out that it takes a lot of time.
LP: Yeah.
Anders Koppel: My time of catching up with new trends and so on, new music, is more limited now than when I was a young guy. I had a lot of time because we make an album from time to time and we're touring, but you know, new music, we wanted to hear everything. What can go into our music? And now it's more a question of pursuing my path, you know? So I cannot say that I'm very much into the new trends. I hear things, of course, from time to time, but I'm in no way complete.
LP: It's pretty much impossible to be these days. There's so much music. It's so exciting, but it's so daunting. I know I wake up every day and realize there's so much going on out there in sub-genres and little micro scenes and regional things going on that I'll never know about at all.
Anders Koppel: I read the other day that every day, three hundred thousand new songs are being put on Spotify and all of this. Three hundred thousand songs.
LP: Yeah. This point comes up a lot in this podcast and these discussions, but I see a lot of hand-wringing in the music industry and from industry commentators about how there's so much music and not a lot of it's good and the streaming services are being inundated with all these amateurs uploading music. But that strikes me as a net positive for the world. My sort of pithy one-liner about it is that, you know, of all the world's problems, I wouldn't put too much artistic output in the top five.
Anders Koppel: Neither would I. No, no. But the thing is the industry, as you say, is changing in a very rapid manner. So everything is different now than maybe twenty years ago. Everything is changing so fast, so quickly. Even that is hard to keep up with.
So maybe that's the hand-wringing situation because how do we orientate ourselves in a world that is changing so quickly as it is? Because even concerts are changing. When I was a young guy and we made our albums, we could go into the studio for a month, and we could make these fantastic developed things, as Beach Boys or The Beatles did, you know, where we made statements in the form of an album. And for us, and maybe for the rest of the world, try to make some new music, some really new music. Now that is impossible because you cannot make money out of making music in that way anymore. So everything is changing and maybe I cannot say if it's for the better or for the worse. The world has always been changing, but it is changing in a very quick manner now.
LP: Yeah.
Anders Koppel: Now I made an album with Kenny Werner and Benjamin once, and it was called Everything is Subject to Change. And that's truer now than ever.
LP: One of the only developments of the last maybe ten or fifteen years that I think actually disturbs me, if that's the right word, is just all the new pressure on the artists themselves, especially younger artists who have, or even mid-career artists who have to learn a different sort of game than they thought they were getting into. The idea that everybody has to promote all the time, and they have to make all this other sort of supporting video and audio and all, like all the other work they have to do around the work. Now, no one actually has to do it. I probably am not choosing my words well, but if you want to be in the competitive end of the spectrum, and it's just, it seems like there's so much more of a hustle that artists have to go through. And it doesn't seem fair to ask them to be digital marketers and amateur video producers and my one lament would be, if all that time that they're spending on that other stuff could just be about composing and arranging and being in the studio and performing. I would wish that for artists, you know.
Anders Koppel: And having the time to develop their instruments, to practice even. Yeah. You're completely right. There's a lot of distractions in a career. And you have to maintain a concentration on the important issues, which is the music, but maybe not so much now as it used to be. I can see that, even in concerts, the audiences like more and more that not a concert as such, but an event, a complete event where the visuals are just as important as the music, maybe even more so. I'm not into that ball game at all. And I have the right to not be in the ball game because I'm seventy-seven years old. I think I will stick to my trade.
LP: Hey, you know, the Rolling Stones just finished a tour of stadiums here in America and they've got a few years on you.
Anders Koppel: Yeah, I know. Same procedure as last year, right?
LP: Something that's definitely a hallmark of your career is this integration of genre. I don't know how to say it. I would say it's less a disregard for genre and more an integration of genre. Like you sort of take from wherever inspiration strikes you. That's my impression. You don't seem limited.
Anders Koppel: I think maybe that your music reflects the music you have been into, of course, and I have been into a lot of different music in my life. I have been into Cuban music, and Turkish music, and jazz, of course, and classical music, and whatever, African music, Brazilian music. And so I have focused on a lot of things. And I think that everything is reflected in my music. And I think me and Benjamin are a bit like each other in that way too. We are not limited by what others call labels or genres.
I'm into music. I remember I once saw an interview with Duke Ellington and he's sitting at the piano, and he's asked a question by the television show, "Mr. Ellington, what is jazz to you?" And Ellington says a wonderful Ellington-esque quote, a wonderful quote, and he says, "Yeah, I don't know about jazz, I know about music." And I have seen that he maintained that view always. It was not a smart remark on a television show. He really meant that he didn't care about jazz, he cared about music.
And that is, of course, so wonderfully reflected in his music, which is, of course, open to inspirations. Open to sound, open to new ways of doing things. Inspirations from everything, actually. I think Mr. Ellington was right in that respect, too. I feel the same way.
LP: Did you ever see him perform?
Anders Koppel: Yes, I did. In the Tivoli Gardens concert hall. And he had some wonderful scotchies, square trousers with green squares on. He was very sharp looking, and of course it was wonderful. Johnny Hodges was there, and I mean, it was the band. I also saw him in sixty-nine, when my band, The Savage Rose, played in Newport Jazz Festival. He was there with his band, and I heard it, of course. He's always been one of the guys, one of the stars on the sky, of course.
LP: Who else do you remember from that '69 lineup?
Anders Koppel: That was the year when the Newport Jazz Festival opened up to other genres.
LP: Yeah.
Anders Koppel: So there was rock music there, there was soul music, James Brown. My band was scheduled to play after Sly and the Family Stone.
LP: Wow.
Anders Koppel: Which kind of made me a little nervous because they always were and still are one of my favorite bands. I love them very, very much. It's such original, fantastic music. They really tore the place apart, you know, everything was in riots after the show. And so luckily our performance was postponed to the next day.
LP: Give everybody a chance to cool down a little bit.
Anders Koppel: But I heard so many things there. James Brown, as I mentioned, everybody was there. It's fantastic.
LP: That's an interesting era when, the way the concert bills would get mixed back then, you know, here in America, you had Bill Graham putting Miles Davis opening for the Grateful Dead or the Jefferson Airplane, or some of those rock bands would go to Europe and play on jazz festival lineups. Such an interesting time to illustrate that sort of comment from the musician's point of view, it makes sense to be in all those contexts and environments because they're all just playing music.
Anders Koppel: And Miles was inspired by Sly and the Family Stone and so on and so on.
LP: Yeah.
Anders Koppel: So everything is mixed anyhow. So let's just keep it that way.
LP: So you have some interesting projects coming up later this year and I'm wondering what is this interest in composing for military brass bands?
Anders Koppel: Yeah. It seems to be. In the last year, I made two big pieces for military brass bands. I have done so earlier also. Actually, I love the sound, the homogeneity of the sound of the brass instruments. So in the autumn, I wrote a piece based on seven poems written by children in Theresienstadt Concentration Camp during World War II. It was a huge success and now it will be played in the museum in Theresienstadt in Prague, Czechoslovakia.
So that's very interesting. I find it inspirational to write for such homogeneous ensembles as a military brass band, or I could say a string quartet. It's very easy to write good-sounding music for. And the same goes for the brass field. So I love writing for that.
LP: Yeah, there's something beautifully subversive and obviously very pointed from a commentary point of view about having, juxtaposing the children from the concentration camp with the sort of military martial style of music, and you know, it's very powerful. I think my ignorance about that music is very stereotyped, right? I just have a very surface-level sense of what the music would be, and I'm very curious to dig in more and to find where the dynamics are and how you get some of those other textures.
Anders Koppel: The military marching band, or military brass bands, are so much more than marching music, of course. Very much. It's actually any kind of music you write for them, you can write anything. You don't have to write marches. I didn't write marches, of course. I write soulful tunes for these instruments. In Denmark, and I know in America too, the musicians in the military bands are very skilled players, very good players. So they can make their instruments sing as if any other orchestra.
LP: It must be fun for them to play something that's stylistically different as well.
Anders Koppel: Yeah, they love it because it challenges them in a different way, of course, to give them more soulful music, maybe to sing, on their instrument.
LP: That's incredible. So I guess, is the cadence of your life and your creative life at this point, like, do you work more during the summer festival season or work more in terms of gigging or like, how does it work for you? You know, as part of your year composing and part of your year performing or is it, can you characterize it?
Anders Koppel: It's more or less as it always has been. When I'm not playing, I'm composing. When I'm not composing, I'm playing. Maybe I'm playing a little less than I used to when I was younger because I'm not that much on the road, but that's not my choice. I think it's just as much a question about the markets, the whole live markets is changing.
LP: Yeah.
Anders Koppel: So it's not that easy to get as many concerts as I used to have. But I'm still playing. I have different bands. I play with Benjamin. I have a trio. I have a duo with a cello player. And so we're playing every month, all the time, actually. And I also play from time to time with my daughter Marie, who is a soul singer, gospel singer, at Christmas time, mostly, and so I'm busy as a musician, I'm busy as a composer, and I hope to, I hope that I can keep it that way.
LP: Me too. Thank you so much for making time to talk with me. It's a great honor, and I appreciate it so much, and thank you.
Anders Koppel: It's been a privilege.
