The now 72-year-old pianist Thomas Clausen is not a new character in the story of Danish jazz. He’s been a key contributor and participant in its development since his arrival on the scene in the early 1970s as a fresh-faced 20-something. In the decades since, he has been a member of a number of important bands, and has spread his wings as a composer – working with everything from big bands to choirs, as well as chamber and theater music.
At this point in his long and winding career, it’s more of a challenge to come up with a genre or musical medium to which he yet applied his agile fingers. He’s played bebop with the likes of Dexter Gordon and Johnny Grin. He checked out and soaked up Bill Evans, European modernism, and the fusion wave – all in major ways. He’s gone head-to-head with vibraphonist Gary Burton in masterful melodic interplay. He’s conducted and recorded with his Brazilian Quartet... and so much more. Clausen has been all over the map in projects large and small, as a respected leader and a leading-sideman.
Thomas Clausen's Trio is a living, evolving entity in Danish jazz. In its first iteration with Niels Henning Ørsted Petersen and Aage Tanggaard in the 1980s, the young pianist established himself as a true Great Dane. Since then, most of the leading Danish rhythm-section players have done time in one or more of his ever-changing trios. In 2006,
he formed his fourth (and current) trio with bassist Thomas Fonnesbæk and drummer Karsten Bagge. It was the same year
that the trio would release BACK TO BASICS – an album that celebrates the legacy of the classic acoustic jazz piano trio with a repertoire of jazz standards, appropriately enough. The recording was and remains critically acclaimed, still as intense and fresh today as it was upon its release all those years ago.
Now, 15 years later, Clausen gives us BACK 2 BASICS – with the
same swinging crew whose collective identity has become even more luminous, claried, and mature as they survived and thrived through the performances in the interim.
credits
released July 16, 2021
Thomas Clausen (piano)
Thomas Fonnesbæk (bass)
Karsten Bagge (drums)
Trio founded by Fugazi's former rhythm section recruits saxophonist James Brandon Lewis for a frenetic jazz-punk group project. Bandcamp New & Notable Mar 21, 2024