Trumpet virtuoso Lindemann welcomes spontaneity with all-star musical event
Call it the groove connection.
On Jan. 25, trumpet player Jens Lindemann will be leading an international, all-star concert at the National Music Centre. It’s called Crossroads, which makes it sound a bit bluesy.
Blues could very well be involved, but so will a dizzying number of other genres and styles and international traditions, all brought to you by a global team of instrumental masters with a serious knowledge of the universal groove.
It will all begin with Jewish music, which may not sound like the traditional starting point for a journey that will eventually encompass all manner of popular genres. But if you follow the trail, Jewish hymns and Middle Eastern grooves led to Klezmer, which influenced swing, which influenced pop music of all sorts. The concert will also touch on Polynesian grooves and Latin American music. By the end of the night, music lovers will have heard samples of everything from ancient hymns to gospel and spirituals to East Indian percussion.
“The idea is to turn this into an international concert, but connecting all parts of it with grooves that are relevant and current and showing how each area of the world has impacted the other,” says Lindemann, in an interview from his home in Los Angeles. “In short, it’s a way to say that it basically doesn’t matter what the style of music is, there’s a connectivity that draws us all to the same place.”
Lindemann, who was born in Germany but grew up in Edmonton and received much of his music education at the Banff Centre, has put together an impressive international roster of musicians for the concert. They include renowned Israeli percussionist Gilad Dobrecky, Samoan jazz pianist-saxophonist and vocalist Matt Catingub, Bulgarian multiinstrumentalist Kristian Alexandrov, Persian santur master Amir Amiri and local jazz artists Tyler Hornby on drums and Jeremy Coates on bass.
Lindemann, who has played with all the above musicians individually over the years, will be quarterbacking the night, bringing solo performances and impromptu joint performances involving all the musicians.
“As an ensemble, we’ve never all performed together,” he says. “This is intentional. We have one rehearsal the day of the show. There is a freshness to this concert and we want the audience in on that. We want them to understand with us being on stage together for the first time there’s a type of energy you have with really great musical artists the very first time you play something. There’s an energy there that you can’t capture once you start rehearsing.”
Lindemann, who was the first classical brass player to receive the Order of Canada, is an appropriate quarterback for the night. Known as one of the world’s great masters when it comes to the trumpet, he is also shown an insatiable curiosity when it comes to the possibilities of brass music and all genres.
In 2017, he released two albums consecutively, showing his impressive range as both a horn player and music scholar.
In early September, he entered the world-famous Air Lyndhurst Studio in London with producer Steve Epstein and engineer Richard King, who have collectively won more than 30 Grammys. They joined conductor Pinchas Zukermann and the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra in recording an album that highlighted material of historical importance to the trumpet. That includes Joseph Haydn’s 1796 Concerto in E-Flat and Johann Nepomuk Hummel’s 1804 Concerto in E Flat. Both were specifically written for the chromatic trumpet, which had only recently been invented.
Around the same time, Lindemann also released Brassfire, which was recorded at his old stomping grounds of the Banff Centre. Among other musicians, it features Catingub on piano, sax and vocals, Alexandrov on Hammond B3 and Dobrecky on percussion and covers everything from Duke Ellington to southern gospel to 1980s rockers Toto.
“I’ve always played contemporary music and pop music and jazz, all of that,” Lindemann says. “I’m trying to blur those lines and that stereotype that you are one sort of musician or another. Those lines were only ever put on society by record companies that were trying to sell a product. I think we all agree that era is over so we might as well just get back to talking about music just being music.”