The soundtrack is based on compositions by Jakob Bro, performed by Bill Frisell, Lee Konitz, Craig Taborn, Paul Motian, Andrew Cyrille, Arve Henriksen, Midori Takada and many others.

Venice Film Festival title “Music for Black Pigeons,” directed by Danish filmmakers Jørgen Leth, best known for “The Five Obstructions,” and “The Lost Leonardo” helmer Andreas Koefoed, is available now worldwide. The documentary, which premieres on in Venice’s Out of Competition section, explores the lives and processes of some of the world’s most renowned and prolific jazz musicians, including Jakob Bro, Bill Frisell, Lee Konitz, Paul Motian and Midori Takada.

The footage in “Music for Black Pigeons” was shot over the course of 14 years, throughout North America, Europe and Japan. From the hours of recordings, Leth and Koefoed discovered intimate, improvised moments between pioneers of experimental music at recording spaces in New York, Copenhagen and Lugano.

Unpredictable live jams are interspersed with brief, illuminating portraits of those taking part, such as jazz saxophonist Mark Turner, double bassist Thomas Morgan, jazz drummers Joey Baron and Andrew Cyrille, trumpet player Palle Mikkelborg, the prolific founder of ECM Records, Manfred Eicher, and many more.

The film includes some of the final recorded performances of several musicians who died during the course of filming, including Lee Konitz, Jon Christensen, Tomasz Stanko and Paul Motian.

Leth said: “With this kind of music, you have to follow the natural development of ideas. That’s important. You have to capture these spontaneous moments and pay attention to the characters, to what they are saying to each other. It’s not something that’s fixed from the start. It takes shape while you are filming. The most important thing was to follow the process, I guess. That’s what we do in the film. We see how it develops, how it grows and takes shape. How single words start to form whole sentences and meanings.”

Koefoed, whose art thriller “The Lost Leonardo” premiered at Tribeca 2021, added: “We found out that when musicians had difficulties with putting music into words, the final result was always very interesting. It just proved that music is something that can’t be just boiled down to one simple formula. People who were able to immediately explain exactly what they were doing were also… a bit boring. When they had difficulties, it felt as if they were trying to approach something mythical that maybe shouldn’t be even approached.”

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On Sound Flower three masters of improvised music from different generations meet for the first time as a trio and their world of sound (in Danish: klangverden) is immediately captivating. You can listen to each performer and they will tell you a story of their own, or you can take a step back and listen to the unit, which is a completely different experience.

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Jakob Bro’s collaboration with the two distinct saxophonists the New York/Berlin-based multi reed player Andrew D’Angelo and Danish alto legend Jesper Zeuthen dates back to 2007, when they appeared on the ensemble albums The Stars Are All New Songs Vol. 1 and White Rainbow and played multiple concerts together. The core group also consists of career-long trio collaborators Anders Christensen and Jakob Høyer as well as versatile Copenhagen-based improvisers such as Søren Kjærgaard, Kresten Osgood and Jeppe Skovbakke. Joining on this recording session is synth-wizard Adi Zukanovic and the in-demand double bassist Matthias Petri, as well as the tenor saxophone player Bill McHenry, a Paul Motian alumni and bandleader in his own right, who Jakob Bro first heard playing with Reid Anderson, Andrew D’Angelo and Ben Monder while they all lived in New York many years ago.

Originally known as the Nonet, the Jakob Bro Large Ensemble has been a laboratory for a large group expression full of contrasts in sound and fiery blows from tripling up each instrument, but also looking for beauty in every song and each note. By playing the compositions in different size bands, with an ever-evolving group and across years of collaborating, the compositions open up and find new life – a message also conveyed to Bro by the influential drummer and mentor Paul Motian, who appeared on Balladeering and three other albums with Bro.

On “New Morning” roots run into the realm of improvisation and creating sounds together in the moment. Søren Kjærgaard, Jeppe Skovbakke and Jesper Zeuthen open the album with “Trio”, and Kresten Osgood and Andrew d’Angelo respectively plays each a solo piece on drums on “Osgood” and bass clarinet/alto saxophone “For Bro”, before the ensemble takes a dive into their collective creation “Tutti” and five soulful compositions by Jakob Bro.

With the release of “New Morning”, Jakob Bro is finally back with his first large ensemble recording in ten years on the Copenhagen-based platform Loveland Music, which currently is also releasing music by Jesper Zeuthen/AC/Marilyn Mazur, Mark Turner, Thomas Morgan/Maria Laurette Friis and the motion picture soundtrack to Music For Black Pigeons.

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Longtime collaborators Mark Turner and Jakob Bro play central roles in the featurelength documentary film “Music for Black Pigeons”, which premiered at the 79th Venice Biennale, played across film festivals worldwide and portrays the unique artistic processes of Paul Motian, Lee Konitz, Bill Frisell, Craig Taborn, Andrew Cyrille, Manfred Eicher and many others. Mark Turner is heard on three albums with Jakob Bro, all from Avatar Studios in New York, and enters the film in a session from Copenhagen working on his first solo studio album with Bro as producer.

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Wadada Leo Smith: Trumpet
Jakob Bro: Electric Guitar
Marilyn Crispell: Piano
Andrew Cyrille: Drums & Percussion

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So what happens if you bring together Maria Laurette Friis, the Copenhagen-based composer, multi-instrumentalist and one of Scandinavia’s unique voices, and the exceptional double bass player Thomas Morgan in an improvised session? Well, it continues for more than three hours and develops into a subtle ‘fantastic’ language of its own.

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The title, taken from a Midori Takada composition, refers to the spiritual bond that arises in every new friendship, whether in music or in life.

Until I Met You is pure acoustic music, a tapestry of dreamlike compositions with beautiful melodies that sees ambient music icon Midori Takada on grand piano, marimba and various percussion instruments and acclaimed Danish composer Jakob Bro on the acoustic guitar.

Although somewhat unexpected choices of instruments, Takada and Bro share the affinity of openness and exploring sound as source material. Taking a step deeper beyond musical training, cultural background and age difference (which also would be besides the point since Midori Takada is by Bro considered forever young at heart, and Bro himself is nearly fluent in Japanese language), Until I Met You is its own ecosystem, a gesture of unity and worldbuilding.

“I try to express myself with sound and have no ambition with my instrument other than to create moments of beauty with my fellow collaborators. I see Midori Takada as someone who can do exactly this. Turn a moment of nothing into something,” says Jakob Bro.

Midori Takada (b. 1951) is a percussionist, composer and performance artist, whose output over the past 50 years weaves through solo, group and theatrical practices. Considered a rebel in the classical world of music, she debuted as soloist in 1978 with the Berlin Radio Symphony Orchestra, but later abandoned her Western classical training to study drumming in Ghana and Côte d'Ivoire and Gamelan music of Indonesia, and composing works that incorporate the structures of traditional music. She has also worked extensively with improvised music and appeared in numerous productions by the world-renowned director Tadashi Suzuki. As an environmental musician, she has created soundscapes for the Art Institute of Chicago and the Victoria & Albert Museum in the United Kingdom.

Her landmark album, Through The Looking Glass (1983) is considered an essential recording of minimalist music in chime with the peak period ambient and fourth world musics explored by Jon Hassell, Don Cherry and Brian Eno, but born of a distinctly Japanese ceremonial and meditative musical sensibility. The LP reissue sparked a series of sold out solo performances across Europe and the U.S., including the London Barbican, Paris Palais de Tokyo, Berlin Hebbel am Ufer, The Kitchen in New York, and the Getty Centre in Los Angeles.

Nearly 45 years after her first soloist performance with the Radio-Symphonie-Orchester Berlin, almost as if by fate Takada began her collaboration with Jakob Bro with a 2022 commission by Pierre Boulez Saal, resulting in two improvised concerts in Berlin and Copenhagen. These encounters also led to meeting Nordic greats such as Palle Mikkelborg, Marilyn Mazur, Nils Petter Molvær, Jesper Zeuthen, Anja Lechner, and a performance at the World Expo in Osaka.

Jakob Bro (b. 1978) is a guitarist and composer based in Copenhagen, Denmark. He has recorded more than 20 albums as a bandleader with artists such as Lee Konitz, Bill Frisell, Paul Motian, Charles Lloyd and many others, and his various ensembles are depicted in the award-winning film “Music for Black Pigeons” (dir. by Jørgen Leth and Andreas Koefoed), which premiered at the Venice Biennale and has been featured at film festivals around the world. Since 2020 Jakob Bro has had a yearly stint at New York’s Village Vanguard, and he frequently performs in Japan.

“Jakob Bro creates magical music, impossible to categorize or capture. His songs are best described as jewels revolving in mid-air, reflecting and refracting light,” writes Downbeat. “Based on an idea of the slow, simple melody and a nearly Buddhist ideal of relinquishing the ego, Jakob Bro has lifted jazz into a new future,” Danish newspaper Politiken adds. It is Bro’s conviction that “the music has to breathe. It’s important that a kind of organic conversation is taking place.”

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"...the material is spacious, devoid of any obvious time signature and composed by all three musicians, often including improvisation. “Sonic Mountains” features Smith’s powerful blasts before the trumpeter drops out midway, allowing room for Bro’s chimed, minimalist chording and Gilmore’s creative cymbal accents. “Yoyogi Park Dream” features Marcus Gilmore’s brush work among Jakob Bro’s dreamy, effects-laden accompaniment, and brass expressionism that proves Wadada Leo Smith’s lungs are at full capacity at age 83.

The best of the co-composed pieces is “Heart Language,” Bro’s elegant intro and call-and-response lines meshing with Smith as Gilmore creates a supple undercurrent. Smith contributes one composition, his solo piece “Chronicles of Bending — Air Columns and Fire Discourses” making the listener want to hear more than its one minute and 37 seconds. But Smith and Gilmore’s co-composed “Imagine the Fire and Flames That Light Up the Light World” makes up for any perceived slight. Clocking in at more than eight minutes, the track seems to encapsulate free jazz’s past, present and future." – Jazztimes

"Murasaki and The Montclair Sessions represent the best in improvised music. Wadada Leo Smith is exceptional on both, and the other talented musicians frame his lines brilliantly. Bro is ostensibly the leader, but he is fully aware of the musical talents in the room. He rarely solos, more content to share the spotlight. Listeners do themselves a disservice by not gravitating towards both recordings. [...] Seldom will you see such an aggregation of talent. Crispell is an NEA Jazz Master and Cyrille and Smith deserving of that title as well. Gilmore is acknowledged as one of today’s leading drummers, increasingly playing ‘out’ as well as ‘in.’ Bro has been increasingly prolific in recent years, becoming a major force in improvised music."

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WIRE Magazine: “Morgan is an in-demand American jazz bassist but, for his debut as a leader, he plays WOODS a virtual instrument he designed using SuperCollider software which emulates pan-global string instruments. Morgan calls upon an impressive line-up including trumpeter Ambrose Akinmusire, drummer Gerald Cleaver, and Henry Threadgill on flutes, for a series of duets and it works like a charm. With Bill Frisell, he approximates a donso ngoni while the guitarist weaves acoustic webs smeared with electric swells. A meeting with 95 year old Beat poet and Zen prophet Gary Snyder matches suitably koto-like cascades with rich and unhurried spoken meditations. "Why are we here?, asks Snyder. To make and appreciate art like this, of course.”

Bandcamp Daily: "Hearing Morgan deploy his strange machine, featuring a stacked guest roster that includes Bill Frisell, Ambrose Akinmusire, Henry Threadgill, Gerald Cleaver, and others, runs amok, updating and evolving the algorithm as the mood dictates—it’s a glorious mind-melt."

Jazztrail: "Still absorbing its many layers, I have no doubt Around You is a Forest is the work of a visionary—distinct, immersive, and profoundly original. Each piece feels self-contained yet essential to the whole. Traditionalists may balk, but this may well be the year’s most imaginative and best debut."

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