Tag Archives | Denmark

Today Danes certainly know how to rock, or at least how to pop. Danish pop music has often been strong, and Denmark has often been a serious competitor in the Eurovision continent-wide song contest. Denmark has even won the main prize twice–in 1963, with Grethe and Jørgen Ignmann’s “Dansevise” in 1963 and in 2000 with the Olsen Brothers’ much less groovy English-language “Fly on the Wings of Love.”

Scandinavians, especially Danes, not only somehow feel an affinity for Jazz–clearly an African-American-originated art-form–but also have such a clear, demonstrated ability at composing and performing it. In the early ’20s American big band leader Sam Wooding had become an expatriate in Europe and led the backing orchestra for the “Chocolate Kiddies,” an all African-American collection of performers that toured the continent extensively, and very effectively, introduced countries like Russia to Duke Ellington and big band jazz. In 1925 Wooding and his orchestra performed in Copenhagen and wowed the crowd. Though there had been a few earlier Danish jazz rumblings, Wooding’s visit inspired a generation of young Danish musicians to drop their lurs and learn the trombone.

Since then, the Danish jazz scene has been hopping. When the Nazis occupied Denmark during World War II most of Denmark’s jazz musicians escaped to Sweden, where they played openly and often, ushering in what has been called Scandinavia’s “Golden Age of Jazz.” After the War the Danish jazz scene revived and Copenhagen became its hub, so much so that American saxophonist Stan Getz became an expatriate there in the 1950s. Today the Copenhagen Jazz Festival is among world’s most respected and Danish jazz musicians like Vietnamese-Danish double bassist Chris Minh Doky influential on the international jazz scene. Watch the Chris Minh Doky band perform in Copenhagen in 2010.

Danish folk ensembles may well feature the occasional accordion or guitar, but at the heart of Danish folk music there’s always a  fiddle. Unlike fiddlers found in other Scandinavian countries, Danish fiddlers most often wield the Danish fiddle in bunches, and they fiddle fast and furious. For example, in this video watch Danish fiddler Harald Haugaard and his co-teachers from his 2011 international Fiddle School fiddle a crowd into a frenzy.

For our last week of Western European music we’ll go somewhere we didn’t have a chance to go very much in class — Denmark!

Danish folk music experienced a revival in the ’70s, similar to the folk revival in the U.S., when contemporary artists revived and reinterpreted traditional songs, celebrating and simultaneously advancing ancient traditions. Ensembles like Haugaard & Høirup and Danish-Swedish folkies Habbadam keep that the tradition of reinventing traditions alive. Many contemporary Danish musicians also draw upon Danish folk music themes, weaving them into forms such as rock and even electronica, creating the hybrid “folktronica.”