Take Five with Trinelise Vaering and Fredrik Lundin aka Offpiste Gurus

Instrument(s):

Vocal, saxophones, guitar, bass and drums.

Teachers and/or influences?

Our music sounds somehow like a mix of all the music we love, blues, roots, jazz, country, rock, trip hop. We've been influenced by musicians and bands like Tom Waits, Rickie Lee Jones, Dr John, Lead Belly, Portishead, and many, many more....

I knew I wanted to be a musician when...

When there was no turning back.

Your sound and approach to music:

We try to make our quintet sound like a band of twice as many musicians. We want to communicate like a rock band, but being able to be subtle like a jazz band.

Your teaching approach:

Help the student to teach himself, as we thought ourselves.

Your dream band:

Well, our dream band is Offpiste Gurus. There's no one we'd rather play with these days, than Rune Funch, Thomas Vang, Jeppe Gram, and each other. We wouldn't mind, though, if we could persuade Tom Waits to join the band for a couple of gigs.

Road story: Your best or worst experience:

The band's a bit too young to have gathered any stories like that yet. We'll be back after our fall tour.

Favorite venue:

For now, it must be Copenhagen Jazzhouse.

Your favorite recording in your discography and why?

Well we've only got the one, and it's very new, so quite naturally we're extremely satisfied with that.

The first Jazz album I bought was:

Sonny Rollins, Live at the Village Vanguard.

What do you think is the most important thing you are contributing musically?

Hard to say yourself. We think, though, that we and the music we play have the ability to communicate very emotionally and powerfully, and we hope that we're able to come across as being entirely honest. We're not trying to cater to any particular group of music lovers, we just play what we really believe is our music.

Desert Island picks:

We'll need a couple of islands.

How would you describe the state of jazz today?

Much as it's always been: jazz being at fringes of society, never really getting to be mainstream, no matter how hard certain artists try. Which is as it should be.

What are some of the essential requirements to keep jazz alive and growing?

Honesty and courage. That goes for musicians as well as everyone else involved in the music.

What is in the near future?

Release concert in Jazzhouse June 19th. European tour in the fall. And then we should start planning the next recording with the band, which should be something very different from this one, or we wouldn't buy it ourselves. Maybe lots of guest musicians, some of our Austin friends, Swedish singer Freddie Wadling.

By Day:

We work our asses of every waking hour of the day, booking, teaching, practicing, writing, taking care of our kits: We don't have day jobs, we have 24-hour jobs.

If I weren't a jazz musician, I would be a:

Dead, probably.

Photo Credit

Courtesy of Fredrik Lundin

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