- 141Recommend It!
- 11,757views
Interviews
Lars Danielsson: Love is the Message
James Pearse
An Englishman in StockholmAAJ: Tigran counts among his early jazz influences Miles Davis's fusion period and the classic jazz songbook, as introduced to him by a teacher who had studied with Barry Harris.
LD: I can see that. Tigran sees my music exactly the way I do, and he composes music the way I do.
AAJ: Where do you feel Tigran gets his inspiration?
LD: I would say his music reflects his life and upbringing in Armenia and his love of jazz, of course. I don't know exactly how far he is influenced by European classical music, but I would say a lot. When I first heard him, I heard straight away how his musical language fits what I do and how I think.
AAJ: This is a new quartet for you, but you've played with some of the musicians before. Can you tell us a little about how you know them?
LD: It's always very exciting for me to create a new group of musicians and see where we can take my music. I've known Arve Henriksen for a number of years. We both collaborated with Jan Bang, who works with sampling. Arve also lives in Mölnlycke. He's Norwegian, but lives here in Sweden. We bumped into each other one day near the lake. I didn't even know he had moved here, so when I found out I invited him to come along and play on Liberetto.
John Parricelli worked on my last album, Tarantella (ACT, 2009). We first met during a recording [Silence, Night and Dreams (EMI Classics, 2007)] with Polish film composer Zbigniew Preisner. John has a really nice sound and always puts a lot of himself into every recording.
AAJ: Then there's Magnus Öström, previously one- third of Swedish jazz trio e.s.t.. His first leader recording, Thread of Life (ACT, 2011), is also nominated for a Swedish Grammy.
LD: I contacted Magnus a couple of months after the death of Esbjörn Svensson [pianist and leader of e.s.t.], who passed away in 2008. Magnus wasn't playing at all during this period, so I invited him to play with my group for a concert in Poland. Since then, we've played together, and it felt really natural to ask him to play on Liberetto. I'm glad he did. He's a wonderful musician.
AAJ: Interaction with other musicians is an important part of your music. You have collaborated with a huge number of international musicians, and the lineup of your group changes almost with each new album.
LD: I really value creating dialogue between myself and others. Communication is everything, so it's really important for me to play with other musicians and react to what they are playing.
AAJ: It must be exciting to discover a musician like Tigran, with whom you connect and dialogue with so well.
LD: I met Tigran for the first time just a couple weeks before we started recording. My manager in Switzerland, René Hess, passed along some of his recordings and told me to check them out. I contacted Tigran, and it turned out he knew my earlier recordings and was as keen as I was to meet up and see what would happen.
AAJ: Things happened pretty fast. Liberetto was recorded in five days over the summer, mixed in September and scheduled for release the following January. From meeting Tigran to the release date, there was a period of just 6-7 months. Do you enjoy working so quickly?
LD: I love it. This was the first time I had done the entire recording at home, so that was a new thing for me, and I am extremely happy with the results. It felt intimate and relaxed at the same time. Since then, other groups have come and used the studio, so it's something I will continue to do. Having five full days in the studio is a rare thing nowadays, so that was a good opportunity.
AAJ: Do you think this freedom and the lack of time restraints have contributed to making this recording richer?
LD: Yes, I think they have. If we had been on tour for a month prior to the recording, we wouldn't have really needed so much time to rehearse and practice together before recording. But, as we'd never played together as a group with Tigran, it was great to have the opportunity to play as we wanted. I knew all the musicians, but the others hadn't played together before.
AAJ: Did you and the other musicians relax together after a long day in the studio?
LD: The others stayed in a hotel, but I slept in one of the recording rooms of the studio. On the Friday night, we played a gig at Nefertiti—a jazz club in Gothenburg. It was great to see how the musicians interacted on stage and how the music that we were working on in the studio came alive in a different way.
AAJ: What messages, ideas or feelings do you aim to transmit with this recording?
LD: Music is the only thing that can stop time, or at least make people forget about it and live in the present. Ideally, when people listen to Liberetto, they won't sit and analyze my music, but experience it. With every new recording, my mission is to create a mood or a set of feelings for my listeners. I don't want my music to be a display of what I can do as a musician. I want to create something that touches people and reaches their hearts. The message I transmit is love. The message is always love.
