Palle Mikkelborg is perhaps best known as the composer and producer of the Aura suite, which he wrote in tribute to Miles Davis and was released as the iconic American trumpeter’s final album in 1989. Scored for a big band and blending jazz fusion with classical impressionism, Mikkelborg’s suite drew upon Davis’s seminal work with the arranger Gil Evans while also nodding towards the influential composers Olivier Messiaen and Charles Ives.
A self-taught trumpeter acclaimed in his own right, Mikkelborg spent decades as a successful bandleader and collaborator from his emergence in the late sixties to sessions with the likes of Dexter Gordon and such ECM luminaries as Gary Peacock and Terje Rypdal.
Yet now in his eighties, he had taken a break from the stage before his celebrated return to live performance at DR Koncerthuset in Copenhagen in February of 2023. Ushered by the guitarist Jakob Bro and backed by another Danish jazz titan in the percussionist Marilyn Mazur, the set comprised material from the 2018 album Returnings – where Bro and the bassist Thomas Morgan communed with an older generation in Mikkelborg and the drummer Jon Christensen – and from Gefion, which marked Bro’s debut as a leader for ECM.
The relationship between Mikkelborg and Mazur stretches back to Aura as the percussionist was asked to partake in that project and subsequently joined Miles Davis on tour. Bro and Mazur have also collaborated on several occasions over the past decade, notably on a handful of albums by the Danish trumpeter and flugelhorn player Jakob Buchanan.
Those past comminglings and confluences bode well for Strands which finds the trio of Danish improvisers gazing out over a low tide. Jakob Bro’s rippling guitar textures lay a canvas for Mikkelborg on the flugelhorn and trumpet, as the veteran plays with elegant and elegiac restraint, his winsomely sonorous breaths accompanied by wafting sighs. Mazur meanwhile cuts a dash over by the rock pools through burgeoning gongs, bowed metallics and her rumbling drums. Strands is a captivating live document, with Bro adding ‘When we walked out on stage it felt like a homecoming’.
