“There was no difference; it was all just music”: A Conversation with Jakob Buchanan
BY MARK GABRISH CONLAN

When I was given the opportunity to do an interview with Jakob Buchanan, the Danish trumpeter, flugelhornist, and composer about his new release MOLS—The Mols Booklet of Memories, I leaped at the chance. I’d already listened to the album for review purposes and fallen in love with it. It’s at once an artful combination of jazz and classical music (Buchanan wrote it for a four-piece jazz combo and a string quartet) and a piece with roots in the folk music of Denmark in general and Mols, the isolated community in the north Buchanan and his wife settled in in 2020, in particular.

Tell us a little about your background: how you got interested in music and what made you decide to pursue it as a career.
I started playing jazz in high school. My father had always listened to jazz, and I guess it just grew on me as I became a teenager and started playing in bands. I loved to improvise, or maybe even more to compose, even in the instant moment. He would dance with me as I stood on his slippers while his feet made jazzy moves to the music. He also listened a lot to classical music, so for me there was no difference; it was all just music.
My wife had children at a very young age, so I first studied Russian at university before pursuing a musical soloist career at the Royal Academy of Music in Aarhus, Denmark. I graduated in 2001 and got a contract to work with a major big band in Denmark. I then started composing and releasing albums with my own music. In 2009 I released an album with the Jakob Buchanan Quartet: Marilyn Mazur on percussion, Jakob Bro on guitar, and Simon Toldam on piano, titled I Land in the Green Land.
Marilyn loved that album, and she started inviting me to play with her. From that point on, my career really began to blossom.
In 2020 you and your wife Nanna relocated to the remote community of Mols on the Jutland peninsula and bought a property formerly owned by composers and ethnomusicologists Peter and Martin Madsen. What made you decide to settle there?
My wife and I moved to the countryside in Mols in order for me to have more peace and quiet to compose, and also to be closer to the ocean, which is very important to my wife. The area has wonderful nature and is a very popular place to visit in Denmark.
How much did you know about the Madsens and their work collecting Danish folk songs before you moved to Mols? How did you find out about their treasure trove of old Danish melodies?
I knew nothing about the musical history of the area or about our house. So when I later learned about it, it made a big difference. I became very inspired and felt that I was part of something bigger than myself, and that the walls were hiding secrets from the past, musical ones as well.
Rasmus Theisen, a young author from Mols, gave me a book of transcriptions of old folk songs found in a music notebook that had belonged to the old fiddler Peter Madsen. I do not know whether he wrote them all himself or if they were simply notated by him, or perhaps a mixture of both.
When you bought the Madsens’ old property, were you planning to live in the Yellow Cottage? Are you still hoping it can be refurbished and made habitable as a home for you?
Yes, we were planning to live in the house, and we actually did at the beginning. But it was too damp because it had been built directly on the ground without a proper foundation. We are still hoping to restore the house and move into it, but there is a long way to go.
I understand you began your musical career in jazz. How did you branch out and decide to become a classical composer?
I would not call myself a classical composer, but rather a composer who uses classical techniques and methods to tell a musical story. I can no longer really tell the difference between when something is classical, jazz, or folk music. It just comes to me as music when I write, like music in the air.
What made you decide to compose this cycle of pieces for a combination jazz ensemble and classical string quartet?
This is where I feel at home: somewhere between the genres. That is how I truly hear the music. For example, I can listen to Mahler’s Kindertotenlieder and hear, in my inner ear, mallets playing on the skins of toms and floor toms from a drum kit.
Though you’re best known as a trumpet player, you performed all of this album on the darker-toned flugelhorn. Why did you choose that instrument, and why did you run much of your playing through an echo device?
Sorry, but I am actually mostly known as a flugelhorn player. I am not playing through an echo device. The music recorded live in the symphony hall at Musikhuset Aarhus (Musikhuset Aarhus Symfonisksal) in Denmark.
How did you choose the musicians for the jazz group on the album? And why didn’t you use a drummer?
I simply chose my favorite musicians on each instrument. I composed the music with their individual sounds in my head. That is why they came from Gothenburg (Sweden) and L.A. (US) and from Denmark.
I wanted clarinet, bass, and piano because I wanted instruments that could have been present in a dance hall in the old days in this area. Those instruments fitted the sound of the imaginary movie inside my head. For me the drums would not fit in the blend with the strings and it would make the rhythm section louder.
The music on this album is heavily influenced by the free-form jazz of the 1960s, but the overall mood is quiet, lyrical, and pastoral even when the tempos are fast. How did you achieve this balance?
Perhaps the music is inspired by free-form jazz. If so, that was not intentional. Most of the music was composed on my flugelhorn while looking out of the window of my little circus wagon.
I recorded my melodic lines and later transcribed them, and then began composing with them and blending them with the sound of the string quartet. My intention was to tell a musical and instrumental story in which all the instruments had equal roles. I did not want to make a “jazz with strings” album.
This is simply how I hear the music. Recording it blew my mind, because the result was so much better than I had ever hoped for. They are all wonderful musicians, so wow!
The opening track, A Minor Masquerade in Thwaite, has a strain that reminded me of “America, I Love You,” a song written by Archie Gottler in 1915 and recorded by Claude Thornhill in 1940. Had you ever heard that song before, and is it possible that both your piece and “America, I Love You” are based on an old Danish folk song that crossed the Atlantic?
I have never heard that song, but I do believe that music in general has a life of its own. For me, music is a language, and like words, it can wander from land to land and from continent to continent. Over time it can become worn, transform into new variants, and take on new meanings.
A Minor Masquerade in Thwaite was originally called Maskerade and was written in a major key, but I later changed the theme to minor. That is probably something others might also have done over time. We play with words, and we play with musical phrases.
One of your previous pieces is called Songs to the Green Land, co-written with Helge Norbakken and based on personal Greenlandic stories, for choir and jazz band. Any comments on the desire of the current U.S. president to take over and annex Greenland?
Yes, unfortunately I never got the chance to record that music. I consider it some of my best composing, and Helge and I had a lot of fun developing the musical concept and studying the Greenlandic language from a musical perspective.
It makes absolutely no sense that America should take over Greenland, especially not under a president whom the Greenlandic people have no faith or trust in.
Greenland belongs to itself, and over time I believe it will become completely independent from Denmark and fully rule its own country. At the same time, they know that they need friendly nations to help them protect their land. When the United States has a new president in a few years, I believe it will again be a nation that Greenland can count on. I think many people in Greenland believe that.
What are your current plans for future projects?
My current plan is to write a large-scale work: a Mass for Peace including choir, orchestra, and improvising soloists. It will include texts translated into many different languages and also incorporate famous speeches by people such as Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Dalai Lama, words of wisdom. That is the plan, anyway. Let’s see what it evolves into.