Our family dined with
friends last night. Man this gent can
cook. He told me to come hungry and I’m
glad I did. There was, a big,
fresh-baked, irresistible looking focaccia on the table. Sipping a glass of champagne I noticed that
Herbie Hancock’s “Maiden Voyage” was playing.
I asked and he told me it was a Herbie mix he’d put together and my mood
just rose, elevator-like, to another vista of sophistication. Soon we were off in “Empyrean Isles” and “Head
Hunters” and it was effectively ordained that it would be a wonderful
evening.
When extraordinary music is introduced into a setting
unexpectedly, the impact is unique. If
I’m not expecting to hear tasteful jazz and then, its there, I feel like I’ve
been summoned suddenly to a choreography of dignity and distinction. Often, this happens to me in Japan. You walk into a non-descript Excelsior coffee
shop, a Tully’s or any number of different café chains they have there, any
number of small restaurants, bookshops and there it is. Someone has on a classy bop mix on that almost
always takes unexpected, delightful turns.
It makes it difficult to talk about anything else. And, in a business context, debriefing form
some meeting, people aren’t generally interested in sharing your epiphany. So I just let it fill me. It’s one the many, many reasons Tokyo is such
a lovely place to visit.
My host last evening is from Denmark. I was fortunate enough to spend a few days in
Copenhagen once and found it a wonderfully refined place to poke around. We were on about jazz and I remembered that old
Dexter Gordon, that tall giant of the tenor lived there for so many years. On the liner notes of the 1964 Dexter Gordon
album “One Flight Up” I recalled that the big man waxed effusively about the
world-class jazz talent that was there in Denmark. By way of an example he pointed to the young,
eighteen-year-old Dane playing there on the recording date in question, one Niels-Henning
Ørsted Pedersen.
Now I’m going to honest with you. That name is a mouthful
and a foreign mouthful with an inexplicable mark through the O, at that. So in the heat of the moment, glass in hand,
I was not able to turn to my friend and say.
“Ahh, yes, Danish jazz musicians like Niels-Henning Ørsted Pedersen.” Rather, I said, “Now who was that bass player
that played with Dexter Gordon?” to which my friend replied “Ahh, Niels-Henning
Ørsted Pedersen”
We talked a bit about all the jazz luminaries who’d passed
through Copenhagen, and of those who made it their home and of the welcoming environment
of city where racism operated differently than the predictable stratification of
limits back in the United States. And I
took a mental note to try to learn more about Mssr. Niels-Henning Ørsted Pedersen. And one of the first things I learned this
morning is that I’m not the first person to find his name daunting and he is
popularly referred to as NHØP.
I’ve got him on now playing from about 14 years after the
Dexter Gordon set I knew, with Joe Pass on guitar. “Chops” is the title and its
nice as you can really focus on the bass and the expressive solos, with only
one other instrument in the mix like this. Apparently, unlike most bass players
NHØP was strong enough to pick with all four fingers where as most bass players
use only one or two. This enabled him
some exceptional speed that meant he was one of the only men in the business
that could keep up with the likes of Oscar Peterson on piano. I’ve moved on to a disc with the two of them on
now and the speed is terrifying.
I don’t know why, but stories like NHØP’s who disrupted
perceptions about jazz and who it was to be made by and where it was to be
made. Here is a kid, growing up in
Zealand somewhere, who helps to reinvent what is possible in a jazz rhythm
section The greatest jazz musicians in the world, predominantly from the U.S.
all traveled to his world, and wanted to play with him. I’m listening now, to him as an eighteen
year-old on “One Flight Up” and where I’d probably always focused on Dexter
Gordon or Donald Byrd’s trumpet solo, it’s a pleasure to focus now with these familiar tunes, on this brave young Dane’s punchy assertions.
I like a story where innovation pops up someplace,
unexpectedly. Where assumptions about
race and place gets jarred. So many
conversations here in Beijing of late, with people down about innovation in
China. Down on the prospects for
innovation happening here, down as well about the leadership’s ability to
innovate their way out of the gauntlet before them. The education system, the system of state
capitalism and the state-owned monoliths they’ve built, the endemic corruption
all smothering, in many people’s eyes, Chinese and foreign eyes, mind you, any
potential for disruptive creativity to spring up and flower in this soil. But I must say I’ve been speaking with some
companies and individuals here recently, who are doing some truly exceptional
things that have nothing to do with imitation of Silicon Valley business
models, nor do they rely on big SOEs for limitless funds. I look forward to writing about them more, in
the days to come. I look forward to
seeing more policy innovation like the end of the One Child Policy, discussed
yesterday, as the central leadership navigates the precipice. I look forward to some unexpected music
coming from this place that elevates the mood, suddenly, for everyone, 出人意料[1]
NHØP died young, of heart failure at the age of 58, right
there on my birthday, April 19 in 2005.
I was likely walking around in San Francisco that day, thinking about
being 39 and all I still had to do.
I’ll have to remember to drink a toast to the man when next I’m there in
Copenhagen. Memory being what it is I
may not be able to fire off an inquiry about “Niels-Henning Ørsted Pederson”
but I should at least be able to ask where it was that “NHØP” used to play.
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