"Dreams" & "Friendship" now available on all streaming services for the first time ever!
Shortly after the summer of 1989, Niels was on a plane from Paris to New York to begin a new exciting chapter of his career, by recording his first album under his new contract with the prestigious American label Milestone. Niels recalls “I had lined up an incredible stellar cast of top New York musicians including Randy Brecker, Bob Berg, John Scofield, and Adam Nussbaum. This was my first time meeting and working with Randy and we became great friends and went on to do numerous tours and projects together since then. I love Randy, he is one of my all time favorite musicians and human beings''. The great engineer James Farber recorded and mixed the album and Niels’ brother Chris Minh Doky had recently moved to New York and was the bassist on the album. The album was called “Dreams'' and featured mainly Niels’s own original music. The “Dreams'' album came out great and received a lot of praise upon its release. It was made quite visible in the media and record stores in France thanks to the marketing director at Carrere, Milestone’s licensee/distributor in France, Stephane Papinot who did an excellent job promoting Niels. Stephane later became responsible for breaking Niels’ old schoolmate Diana Krall in France, the first territory she broke in, catapulted her into a career stateside that led into superstardom and record sales by the multi-millions.
For the US release of the album in early 1990 Niels’ did an entire week under his own name at what is arguably the most legendary jazz club in history, The Village Vanguard in New York. The gig took place in March 1990 less than a month after the birth of Niels’ twins in Paris. The gig featured an all-star quartet with Bill Evans on tenor and soprano saxophones, Gary Peacock on bass, and Victor Lewis on drums. By this time the club’s original owner Max Gorden had passed and the club was now run by his widow Lorraine Gordon, who was quite a character with a strong life-long presence on the jazz scene. Before her marriage to Max, she was married for seven years to Alfred Lion, who founded the Blue Note record label with Francis Wolff. Niels recalls, “Lorraine was upset about Bill Evans bringing in his own reverb unit for his saxophone”. She told Niels “Why does he need this echoplex, the Vanguard has the greatest acoustics in the world”, not leaving any room for discussion. Nonetheless, according to Niels the gig went well.
Not long after, Niels was already working on his next album for Milestone, called “Friendship”. It was recorded partly in New York and partly in Copenhagen and featured all-star casts from both cities featuring Niels’ closest associates at the time, including Randy Brecker, Bill Evans, Rick Margitza, John Abercrombie, Adam Nussbaum, his brother Chris Minh Doky, Niels-Henning Ørsted Pedersen, Alex Riel, and Ulf Wakenius.
Niels recalls, “By the time the album came out in 1991, I was so much away from the US, absorbed in parenthood in Paris, that I was unavailable to promote my albums properly and frequently enough in the US”. Let alone the fact that Niels’ manager felt that the promotional effort on the part of the label was unsatisfactory from the beginning,as a result, the sales didn’t reach a high enough level in spite of critical acclaim and a good impact in other territories, but those earnings were mainly absorbed by the label’s distributors and licensees and didn’t contribute noticeably to the bottom line at home in the US. Finally, Milestone decided to not renew Niels’ contract, which prompted Niels to begin a series of associations with various European record labels before eventually signing with EMI/Blue Note.
A personal message from The Knight of Jazz, Niels Lan Doky:
“I am so excited that my two "American" albums that I recorded for the Milestone label and released in respectively 1990 ("Dreams") and 1991 ("Friendship") have now finally and for the first time ever just been made available on digital streaming platforms worldwide.
These albums were recorded during some of my most formative years, mostly in New York City and both albums feature pure dream teams and stellar musicians such as John Scofield, Bob Berg, Randy Brecker, Bill Evans, Niels-Henning Ørsted Pedersen, my brother Chris Minh Doky and many others.
Thank you Josh Greenberg and everyone at Milestone Records and Concord Records for making this happen!”
Listen to Friendship here: https://nld.lnk.to/FriendshipAlbum
Listen to Dreams here: https://nld.lnk.to/DreamsAlbum