DETAILED THROUGH THE PERIODS

COPENHAGEN (1963-1981) | BOSTON (1981-1984) | NEW YORK (1984-1989) | PARIS (1989-2013) | COPENHAGEN (2013-PRESENT)

COPENHAGEN, DENMARK

Before leaving London and Paris, Niels had installed a small home studio in the guest house of his in-laws in North London and at the end of 2012 and into 2013 he was working on pre-production demos for a new trio album of his, featuring his young Danish trio and entitled “Scandinavian Standards”. The album was commissioned by the Toshiba-EMI label in Japan but they only required the rights for Japan, so Niels licensed the album to the Parlophone label for the rest of the world outside Japan. At that time there was a big merger going on between multiple major labels and the Parlophone label eventually ended up becoming absorbed by Warner Music who was now by default Niels’ new label. 

Niels and his new family moved into their new apartment in Copenhagen in early April of 2013 and shortly after, work began on preparing the new project with Claus Meyer which was going to be called “The Standard” and was to be beautifully located on the downtown Copenhagen waterfront  and in a famous listed Art Deco building from 1937. The project was to include a jazz club and 3 restaurants, all in the same building. One of the two restaurants on the ground floor was a gastronomic Indian restaurant which Niels’ wife Rizwana took the lead on, and she brought in a Michelin starred Indian chef and some co-investors from a very successful restaurant group in London to make it come to life. The second ground floor restaurant was called Almanak, named after Claus Meyer’s best-selling cooking book of the same name and was kind of a Danish brasserie based on the motto “food like our ancestors would have made if they knew what we know today”. The third restaurant was to be located on the first floor and named Studio. Claus assigned former Noma creative head chef Torsten Vildgård to head Studio as his own first restaurant. Needless to say, it was an ambitious gastronomic restaurant and within 5 months of opening it had already earned a Michel star.  Finally, the other half of the first floor was devoted to the jazz club which was to become a state-of-the-art jazz club with the highest standards and inspired mainly by the jazz clubs in Tokyo which according to many are the best in the world. The acoustics were sublime, and so was the interior design. The equipment was first class, a Bösendorfer grand piano, DPA microphones, Roland record and mixer, Meyer Sound speaker and monitor system, Gretsch drum set, TC Electronic bass amps, etc. The renovation began in June and on Niels’ 50th birthday October 3rd, 2013, The Standard opened its doors with the jazz singer Roberta Gambarini appearing with Niels’ trio for the first two weeks. And Warner Music released Niels’ new album “Scandinavian Standards” around the same time in order to benefit from all the hype of the club opening. The club was utterly high end and set new standards as to what to expect from a jazz club in Copenhagen. It was open 6 nights a week and had several shows a night on Thursdays, Fridays, and Saturdays. The total volume of shows per year exceeded 450 and dramatically increased the number of jazz concert tickets sold in Copenhagen, times 10 according to some sources. 

The intense workload that The Standard represented for Niels required him often to skip nights of sleep and that didn’t help his marriage which was rapidly dissolving in part also because the culture clash and gap that Niels’ Indian/British wife was experiencing after moving to Denmark. 

By the end of 2014, the couple had decided to split up. The legal proceedings required for Rizwana to take their son back to live with her in London took some time and their actual move back to London did not occur until the end of April 2015. 

Although The Standard took up the vast majority of Niels’ time he still found time to write a book (in collaboration with writer Heidi Vesterberg) called “Improvisation” about how to apply jazz and improvisation principles outside of music, at work or relationships, etc. The book was released in 2015 by Gyldendal, Denmark’s most prominent book publisher, and so far only published in Danish. But Niels gave the follow-up talk in English: His TEDx talk entitled “How Jazz Wisdom Will Change Your Life” was held in 2016 and is still available on YouTube. 

In July of 2015, Niels meets his new girlfriend-to-be Sita, just 2 weeks before her scheduled move to Rio de Janeiro to study. She was finishing a bachelor’s degree and moving on to a master’s degree in Brazilian and Portuguese Studies at the University of Copenhagen but a large part of the studies was to take place at several different universities in Rio and subsequently a 6-month internship at the Danish embassy in Brasilia was also a required part of the curriculum. Although they are not all consecutive, Sita spent a total of 2 ½ years in Brazil between meeting Niels in July of 2015 and finishing her master’s degree in January of 2019. As a result, Niels commuted many times between Rio de Janeiro and Copenhagen during this time and as a result, also became inspired to dig deeper into Brazil’s vast and captivating music history and tradition. 

By this time, the old physical CD market was officially dead and Niels was no longer spending as much time in recording studios as he used to. After many decades of LP and CD sales as the main focus of the music industry, live concerts were now once again the main driver. As a result, some jazz players experienced a surge in opportunities as they by default always generally had much more live experience than say pop or rock musicians. The years 2015 and 2016 became the busiest for Niels as a pianist with respective 306 shows performed in 2015 and 276 shows performed in 2016. 

Some of the world’s greatest performers appeared at The Standard Jazz Club including Randy Brecker, Gary Peacock, Brian McKnight, Mike Stern, Alvin Queen, Jeff “Tain” Watts among others and Debbie Sledge of the group Sister Sledge even recorded a live album there. Some projects ran for up to 5 weeks and sold up to an unprecedented 5000 tickets. But the club lasted only until the end of 2016. Although the music production itself turned out to be profitable, the venue operation itself was not sustainable. The few drinks that were sold during the ½ hour that preceded every show were not enough to sustain staff costs, rent, utilities and so on. So a much different business model was needed. So on January 1st, 2017 Niels and Claus closed down the club and from February 2017 and onwards

Niels starting doing some very successful pop up shows and festival events and various prominent venues including the Hotel d’Angleterre in Copenhagen and “The Ultimate Jazz Party” at Sølyst in Klampenborg, just North of Copenhagen which hosted a fabulous array of stars including David Sanborn, Lenny White, Curtis Stigers, Dave Weckl, the Doky Brothers, Camille Sledge and many more. The event received a 7-minute news piece coverage on prime time TV in the USA by the PBS NewsHour channel.  The Summer of 2017 also yielded a tour to Japan to present Niels’ new album “Improvisation On Life” with his trio plus guest vocalists Debbie Sledge and the great young Danish singer Amanda Thomsen.

By the end of the Summer, Niels was invited by the Brøchner Hotel Group to set a club project at their hotel Hotel Danmark. Niels took the opportunity to change the brand name from The Standard Jazz Club to the Niels Lan Doky International Jazz Collective because he wanted a new named that instead of referring to a location referred to an organisation of artists. So inspired by artistic organizations such as The Royal Danish Ballet, The Alvin Ailey American Dance Theatre, Cirque du Soleil, The Royal Shakespeare Company and the Boston Symphony Orchestra, Niels founded the Niels Lan Doky International Jazz Collective on September 12th, 2017 as an association of prolific musicians from three different continents, Europe, North America, and South America - all devoted to presenting unique and exclusive jazz performances of the highest order, which they curate and produce themselves and which cannot be heard anywhere else. Inspired in part by the world of classical music, all of the NLD IJC’s programs reverse the jazz world’s traditional narrative which speaks about the artists first, before speaking about the music that they play. The NLD IJC speaks first and foremost about the music - and only secondarily about the artists who perform it. For all of their programs, they cast musicians in view of serving the music - not vice versa.

The club project at Hotel Danmark only lasted for 2 months and had to abruptly stop by mid-November as the room turned out to contain 3 fire exits and it was impossible to position the stage anywhere where it would be in violation with fire department regulations of minimum required free space surrounding a fire exit.  But in the meantime, the NLD IJC had also started a series of concerts at the National Museum. On October 3rd, 2017 the Rolling Stones were playing a big stadium show in Copenhagen at the Parken arena and some of the musicians in the band, who happen to be jazz great jazz musicians came a did shows with the NLD IJC at the National Museum including their tenor saxophonist Tim Ries and their bassist Darryl Jones. 

The ticket demand was so big that the ticket system broke down. The NLD IJC remained based at the National Museum for the next 12 months.  The following month Debbie Sledge did 6 shows at the National Museum entitled “Debbie Sledge sings Nina Simone” she was joined on stage by New York-based French bassist François Moutin, American drummer Victor Jones and Niels on piano. Debbie and Niels had previously done multiple sold-out shows together in London in addition to numerous shows at The Standard and also in Paris. So they have close musical rapport. February 2018 saw 6 sold-out shows at the National Museum with Debbie’s daughter Camille Sledge playing with Niels’ oldest son Ken Linh Doky who by now is also an accomplished musician and pianist, keyboardist and producer in the field of soul, RnB, Hip Hop, and jazz. March 2018 yielded 6 sold-out shows with guitarist Mike Stern interpreting the music of Jimi Hendrix alongside Niels on piano, François Moutin on bass, David “Fingers” Haynes on drums and Danish singer Nana Nørgaard joining on some songs. Various shows followed for the rest of the Spring culminating with a 10 days program with multiple shows per day as part of the Copenhagen Jazz Festival.

Highlights included the return of Tim Ries and Bernard Fowler from the Rolling Stones, plus shows with the Doky Brothers, a show called Jazz Takes on Contemporary Pop Songs, and more.  Niels’ Summer 2018 schedule also included tours abroad with Mike Stern, Manu Katché, Richard Bona and the Moutin Brothers, François and Louis Moutin among others. In the Fall of 2018, Niels and his team also presented a new festival at the museum entitled “Autumn Jazz Festival 2018” which aside from concerts, now also incorporated film screens and talks, all relating to jazz, of course. 

In early 2019, Niels decided to take a much-needed break and take some time off to compose and record new music of his own plus develop new ambitious plans for the NLD IJC to be launched in 2020. Some concerts are of course inevitable and he took his Danish trio to Spain in July of 2019 for a very successful concert at the San Javier Jazz Festival and before that he did a June 2019 run at Nørrebro Theater with the NLD IJC. 

In the late Spring of 2019, Niels sold his Copenhagen apartment and moved to North Zealand, with his then-girlfriend/now fiancé, Sita, and bought a house large enough to build a recording studio that could contain both of his beloved grand pianos, the Bösendorfer 225 and the Yamaha C3.

For Christmas 2019, Niels and long time collaborator, Randy Brecker, got together with his Danish trio, Niclas Bardeleben, and Tobias Dall, for the first project in that studio to do a Christmas single of “Let It Snow” and “Silent Night” that charted #4 on US Jazz radio in the holiday period.

Niels is currently working on an ambitious 2020: composing and recording brand new material, including his new album “River of Time” (out April 3, 2020), features on multiple albums slated for the end of the year, and a “Modern Standards” series for YouTube, continuing on his legacy of interpreting modern popular music through the lens of Jazz. During the coronavirus crisis and isolation, Niels launched a Facebook Live Stream series daily for two weeks that garnered over 100.000 live views and features on various News outlets including PBS NewsHour in the US, Radio Jazz in Denmark and more. He’ll be embarking on his first tour of Denmark in over 10 years, originally slated for April/May but postponed to Fall due to the Covid-19 situation. Plenty more to come from the Knight of Jazz.