Next week, 1 – 4 September (Thursday through Sunday), Danish hero guitarist Jakob Bro will play four shows at Flagey in Brussels. These concerts will be recorded for a new album with yet another all-new trio. Anders Christensen is known to be faithful to Bro’s sound but top American drummer Brian Blade certainly is not. Together they guarantee a new jazz adventure starting in Brussels. Yes, of course we wanted to talk with Bro before these concerts next week.

Bro is on his way to Tønder, for a concert in tribute to Danish singer/guitarist songwriter Povl Dissing who died way too young. Bro has a role in the band. Driving the distance from his home means he has time to catch up. ‘Of course I’m really looking forward to performing at Flagey for 4 nights next week. Their Studio 1 has the perfect acoustics for my music, acoustics also loved by Manfred Eicher (the big man at ECM where Bro releases his albums). He is the man producing my new album. Manfred’s love for Flagey came about when Maarten (van Rousselt, programmer) organized a very successful ECM weekend there a few years ago, and he now considers it one of the venues where he really wants to record new ECM albums. I love Belgium, as you know, besides Flagey there are so many other fine venues to play and the audience is always very attentive. I’m already looking forward to being able to walk around Brussels for so many days in a row although I’m afraid there might not be that much time after all. After all, we also have recording sessions planned during the day on the Saturday and Sunday. A nice full program to record all the music I have written and everything that was already there and can now get a place’.

We get to talking about the format of the 4 evenings. ‘For the 4 evenings I already have a plan in mind, although that can just as easily change again. I have really collected an awful lot of music, new compositions and pieces I never got around to working on in the past. Music that Anders (Christensen) and I have already done some work on but that Brian (Blade) has no idea about yet (…laughs…). I met Brian last year at a festival/conference in Copenhagen and we got talking about our music. When I mentioned that I would really like to record with him it turned out that he wanted to ask the same of me. So the very best starting position. And with all of our busy work schedules, the adventurous thing is that Brian flies in late and we play together for the first time on Thursday evening in Flagey. So that first night will be one big surprise. And, actually, after that, the other nights are open as well, also because we don’t know how Saturday and Sunday will work out during the day’.

‘In any case, we’re going to record as much music as we can,’ he continues and he also tells us that other music of his will be released this autumn. I recorded an album with Joe Lovano that will be released at the end of autumn. We’ve played live together many times before, but we thought it was time to record something together. So we did that last year. It’s something completely different from what I’ve been doing for the past few years, although I can understand that people thought the transition from the trio albums with Joey (Baron) and Thomas (Morgan) to my last record Uma Elmo with Arve (Henriksen) and Jorge (Rossy) was already pretty big. One hopes your audience grows with the music as much as you do yourself. With other musicians you always make different music and that’s why I’m so very much looking forward to the concert series in Flagey. Everything is open and after four days we will hopefully have more than enough material to choose from…..’.