3 Classic Albums Available On Streaming for the First Time
Jan 17 - We’re very pleased to announce, in collaboration with Universal Music Group, that three of Niels Lan Doky’s classic albums originally released on Polygram Records in the late 90s/early 00s are now set for their digital debut across streaming platforms worldwide:
Niels Lan Doky (1998)
Asian Sessions (1999)
Haitek Haiku (2001)
Here’s some thoughts from the Knight of Jazz leading into their release:
“I am incredibly excited about this re-release after more than two decades since their initial release, on CD only and in select markets.
These two albums marked an important new beginning for me as these were the first albums that I made after the two “Doky Brothers” albums I did with my brother Chris Minh Doky, which were hugely successful and yielded lots of touring around the world. By the end of those years, I was very exhausted and as our contract with EMI/Blue Note had expired after 1997, I decided to accept an offer from PolyGram to sign a record contract with them to start doing my own albums again (the company eventually merged with Universal Music soon after). Prior to that, Chick Corea’s manager Ron Moss had signed me to his management company based out of Los Angeles, so by the end of the decade I was off to a fresh start and felt really good about it.
I have always held the belief that the jazz world made a mistake when it stopped developing new jazz standards out of current pop songs and just kept playing songs from the 1930s and 40s over and over again across the decades instead of playing new ones. During the Doky Brothers years, we experimented with bringing a few contemporary pop songs into the jazz realm, but on my first album for PolyGram “Niels Lan Doky” (released on their Verve-Forecast label in 1998) a total of 50% of the material consisted my jazz arrangements of contemporary pop songs, constantly alternating with my original compositions, to form a fully integrated album with seamless transitions between the two categories of songs. I was very grateful to my label execs Stefan Fryland (Denmark) and Wulf Muller (International) for supporting my idea and creative desire, and soon after contract signing my dear friend and Swedish bassist extraordinaire Lars Danielsson and I started the pre-production work and he became my co-producer.
When time came to do record number two, my A&R director Thomas Rohde (now head of MXD Denmark) and my new manager at the time, Anders Tidemann, organized for me to go on a research trip to Vietnam to explore my roots in the hope of finding some inspiration that could lead to a new innovative album that would merge modern jazz with both traditional and contemporary Asian elements. When my father Thai heard I was going out there, he decided to join me on the trip and it ended up being not only my first (of many) trips to Vietnam but also my father’s first trip back in 53 years. It turned out to be a very exciting, adventurous and emotional experience for both of us. During my process of connecting with my father’s homeland, I met some utterly amazing Vietnamese and Chinese musicians, not least the great composer and producer Quoc Trung and the mesmerizing female vocalist Thanh Lam. It didn’t take long before we reached a musical symbiosis that yielded the co-writes heard on this album entitled “Asian Sessions” (released on Universal/PolyGram’s Emarcy label in 1999). Universal’s art director Peter Stenbæk came up with the album title and the very Asian-looking album cover. The album was tremendously well-received, and for the Danish release, I brought the Vietnamese musicians on a 21 city tour of Denmark with a fantastic band that also included other musicians that appeared”
Thank you very much to Universal Music Denmark team (Maria Svarter, Jesper Knudsen and Rasmus Ardahl) for the assistance in getting these classic albums from Niels’ legendary catalog back out to the fans.