Happy New Year 2024! (from Niels Lan Doky himself)

Photo by Simon Knudsen

Dear all,

My team and I would like to wish everyone a happy, healthy, loving, hopeful, joyful and inspiring New Year 2024. We thank you for your continued support and for being a part of our musical adventures this year, in Denmark, across Europe and in the US  - many of which have been absolutely astonishing. We look forward to continuing the journey with you in 2024 and to taking the music to the next level. And hopefully we’ll make it back to Asia too!

This past year 2023 has felt mostly like a transitional one. On a personal level I started a brand new life chapter by falling in love and getting engaged to a most wonderful and amazing woman. It reawakened my awareness that love is a timeless and limitless guiding light. In spite of two prior failed marriages, I still believe in love and feel blessed and blissful as I trustfully surrender to its abundant magical powers. My beautiful fiancée is American, so I am once again spending a whole lot of time in the US and it is an interesting and rewarding existential learning experience to constantly be exposed to the sharp contrasts between the North American and European cultures through my numerous trips back and forth across the Atlantic. This is particularly interesting at this point in time where the world is in great turmoil and with the US and the EU being among the key players on the global arena. With wars, climate change, polarization and all the geopolitical, cultural and socio economic issues at hand, there is lots to deal with at present.

I also turned 60 this year, another milestone, and that prompted me to consider, for the first time ever, the idea that I might perhaps finally have become a grown-up. But I still don’t feel fully convinced about that. I have never had a desire to be “normal” or live a conventional life. As a young teenager in the 1970s I was lucky enough to become integrated in the circle of the numerous American jazz expats living in Copenhagen at the time, i.e. Kenny Drew, Ernie Wilkins, Thad Jones, Ed Thigpen, Horace Parlan and many others. The first thing I noticed about them was the fact that although they were all old enough to be either my father or grandfather, they were generally far more youthful and joyful than the majority of my classmates in high school. At that time I remember falling in love not only with the music but also with jazz people and this American jazz expat community. I only later discovered that this music is a direct reflection of the people playing it.  Danish bassist Niels-Henning Ørsted Pedersen had integrated this community many years before me, thanks to his groundbreaking virtuosity, supreme musicianship and unique personality. He became my mentor not only on a musical level but also on a personal level, as he showed me that it was in fact possible to be a musical genius with an international career and simultaneously have a family life. He gave me the courage to dare to aspire towards that for myself and today I am very happy to be the father of three. So compared to my original expectations and aspirations I did somehow at least partly end up with a somewhat normal life alongside my life in music.  Legendary drummer Albert “Tootie” Heath, now in his eighties, once told me the following, while pointing to his chest: “There is a young man in here, trapped inside an old body, trying to get out”. As the years go by, this statement resonates more and more with me. Inside I still feel like a teenager. But just a more experienced and evolved version of the exact same spirit that inhabited my 17 year old body back in 1981 when I graduated high school and moved to Boston to study music. So turning 60 this year felt somewhat surreal given that, statistically speaking, I am over halfway through life and likely have less than 40 years left to live. I started my professional career really young, playing regularly at jazz club Vingården in Copenhagen from age 13, and with American jazz expats Thad Jones and Ernie Wilkins from age 15. My early mentors are long gone by now and today I find myself interacting with a majority of artists and music industry people who are a generation younger than I. So during this past year I have become increasingly aware that my generation of artists can and should lead the way going forward, and in a far more focused manner than we have until now.

From a broader perspective, the world seems like it’s on a suicide mission. The signs are everywhere: If everyone consumed as much as the Danes, we would need 5 planet earths to sustain the demand for natural resources. Species are going extinct at warp speed. The next US president could be running the country from a jail cell. World War III seems like a realistic possibility and the nuclear threat is more imminent than ever. The world seems so crazy and unpredictable right now. As there is no space for long term planning and no one knows where we are going, my natural instinct is to go back to the essentials, refocus on the essence. In music, here is what that means for me:

The music industry has always been youth centric but that seems to change now, as statistically more and more young people listen to music that was recorded before they were born, and the Top 200 new songs today only account for an continuously decreasing market share of less than 5%. When I look at the wealth of knowledge and experience that myself and others of my generation have accumulated over the past 4 decades, it is clear to me that the infrastructure for younger generations of artists to acquire the same no longer exists. Maybe that is part of the reason why young audiences now gravitate towards older artists in order to find real substance and deeper meaning. Since the emergence of social media, AI and algorithms, it seems that people are more similar, stereotypical or predictable than ever before. This also applies to artists and their ways of - and reasons for - producing  music. In the wake of what the French call the “democratization” of music, i.e. music having become very cheap to produce as well as very cheap to consume - in short accessible to anyone - the market has become oversaturated with irrelevant products and music with very shallow purpose and intent (but in all fairness, it should be stated that some new really great recordings have also seen the light of day in this era). To me this evolution has only strengthened my recollection of - and renewed my focus on - my original reasons for deciding to become a musician in the first place: As a young teenager my only motivation was a relentless urge to explore, discover and learn how to make great music. I just wanted to solve the mystery of music, one note at a time. I realized that in order to pursue my passion, I would not have time to take on a normal job. As a result, I was left with no other choice but to find a way to turn my passion for music into a way to make a living. Luckily I succeeded, and I am now more focused than ever on the essence of my purpose, stubbornly staying on this never ending path and relentless pursuit of musical excellence, always reaching for the next level of preciousness. As always, I think musical approaches like this can and should be applied in all areas of  life. I plan to continue to do that to the best of my abilities in 2024. 

Niels Lan Doky

Las Vegas, December 31st, 2023