Jazz Articles about Svend Asmussen

Svend Asmussen: The Incomparable Fiddler

by Chris Mosey
March 12, 2016

Danish violinist Svend Asmussen this year celebrates his 100th birthday. This boxed set of five CDs and one DVD looks back on a career in jazz that started in 1933 at Copenhagen's Apollo Theater, when “the Fiddling Viking" was just 17, full of youthful confidence and fronting his own quartet. Four years later the much grander Svend Asmussen Dance Orchestra made its recording debut with the two tracks that open CD1, “Jazz Potpourris 1 and 2." It ...

Svend Asmussen: Embraceable

by Chris Mosey
March 14, 2015

In 1987 when he was a young man of 70, Svend Asmussen played a gig in a small club in Paris. This year, on the eve of his 100th birthday, the Danish violinist rediscovered a tape made of the evening for a Parisian radio station. He says: “I assumed it would be just another radio show which I wouldn't care to hear again. But when it was transferred to CD, it was a revelation. “It was a ...

Svend Asmussen

by Ken Dryden
February 6, 2010

Svend Asmussen is the last of the great swing violinists who emerged during the '30s. The “Fiddling Viking" turns 94 on Feb. 28th, splitting time between his native Denmark and Sarasota, Florida. Recently the violinist performed at the Second Annual Arbors Records Invitational Jazz Party and released new CDs, one a compilation on Storyville (Rhythm Is Our Business) of his '50s Danish quintet recordings and the other made just last year for Arbors, Makin´ Whoopee...and Music!. There is also a ...

Svend Asmussen: Rhythm Is Our Business

by Chris Mosey
November 18, 2009

Once, as they were jamming, Duke Ellington's drummer Sam Woodyard called out to Danish violinist Svend Asmussen, “Man, you play your ass off," to which The Fiddling Viking replied, with that charmingly naïvely innocent wit so typical of his homeland, “From now on then my name is only Mussen." There is just one Svend Asmussen and today, at the age of 93, he is a Danish national treasure, but let's assume, as the above anecdote implies, that ...

Svend Asmussen: Fiddling Around

by Chris Mosey
April 18, 2008

While striving to avoid clichés like the plague, there seems only one way to describe Danish jazz violinist Svend Asmussen: he is still going strong. At the age of 92, “the fiddling Viking" is embarking on a 2008 tour of Scandinavia. Fiddling Around, recorded when he was a mere slip of a lad, age 77, has been re-released by the small Gothenburg label Imogena to mark the event. Listening to it, it seems such a drag that Asmussen turned down ...

Ed Thigpen: In Copenhagen 1973-74

by AAJ Italy Staff
October 6, 2006

Da poco ristampati in un unico CD, i due dischi non rendono giustizia alla sopraffina cifra tecnica del batterista Ed Thigpen, storico componente dell’Oscar Peterson Trio. Anzi il suo impeccabile drumming, che diviene eccelso nell’uso delle spazzole, è svilito da queste incisioni risalenti agli inizi degli anni ’70, quando ebbe inizio il suo soggiorno scandinavo. Nella prima lo troviamo a fianco del violinista Svend Asmussen, per interpretare un repertorio di standard. Quello che non funziona è la strampalata scelta della ...

Svend Asmussen: Still Fiddling

by C. Michael Bailey
June 6, 2002

The Danish Gypsy Soul of Svend Asmussen...

Svend Asmussen is an 86-year-old Dane who has been sawing on his fiddle since the mid-1930s. Listening to Still Fiddling one would never know Asmussen was 86, but one would surmise he has 60 plus years of experience doing what he does. Asmussen has played and recorded with the cream of the swing era. He has crossed paths with Fats Waller, the Mills Brothers, Duke Ellington; Benny Goodman; Toots Theileman, and even Stephane ...