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Oscar Simonsson, one half of Koop, is clear on one thing: halfway through the past decade, jazz became hip again, and bucketloads of bands started making music heavily influenced by jazz - "jazzy" music. And that's something he and his musical partner Magnus Zingmark do not do. So please, mister music journo, don't go down that road.
Actually, even this music journo hears it: this is sample-based music that sounds like live music rather than, err, sample-based music. Is this what modern jazz should sound like?
"During the seventies and the eighties, jazz was unhip, so musicians started experimenting a lot. You know, mixing jazz with rock and stuff. 'Fusion' they called it. It didn't work. Then in the nineties, the 'jazzy' stuff started to become fashionable. But we, as jazzheads, wanted to make jazz. We love the swing rhythm, which is the essence of jazz in our opinion. I don't know if what we do is the way jazz 'should' sound like, it's just our way of making jazz."
Magnus and Oscar met in Uppsala, a small town in the north of Sweden, where they attended university. As they were both gutted by the egocentric attitude of many musicians and the loss of the true spirit of the early days of jazz, they became friends and decided to join forces "in helping Sweden regain that momentum it's lacked ever since the sixties", as their biography states so eloquently. Quite a task.
"The album title Waltz for Koop is a reference to the last great Swedish jazz album of the sixties, Waltz for Debby by Monica Zetterlund and Bill Evans. Actually we upset some Swedish jazz journalists who thought we were taking the piss. And that's exactly the kind of reaction we had expected. Most people in the jazz world have their heads up there where the sun never shines, you know what I mean? They are so fixated on technique and 'the way it used to be' that they have forgotten what it's all about: the music, the freedom in music. When you see a jazz band playing, you get all those guys doing 30-minute drum solos, or bass solos, or whatever kind of solos. And the crowd is going 'o wow, this guy can play, man!', it's ridiculous. Jazz is not about who can play what instrument best, it's about getting together and making music."
You make music with samples, doesn't that tie you down when playing live?
"Not really, because when we play it's not two guys and a couple of computers standing on stage pushing buttons. We play with a real band, I play the piano and we handle the samples manually, so we can improvise when we feel like it. It's so much nicer to play with an actual band than with a boring DAT and a couple of samplers."
But you do write your songs on the computer, right?
"Yes, we do. Mostly we start with a drum sample, then make a few sketches on the computer and let the song develop from there. This process can take a while though, sometimes. We make hundreds of sketches, many of which we just leave on the hard disk. Sometimes we don't use the drum loops for over a year, but one day, while improvising in the studio we think of this or that sample and we dive into the archive, so to speak.
We try to avoid making really long tracks, which happens easily when you're composing on a computer. We try to write real songs, three-minute-long songs, you know? That's why both our albums are fairly short."
Your first album Sons of Koop sounds much more electronic than Waltz for Koop...
"Sons of Koop was all about loops, we wanted to create a hypnotic feeling. Waltz is about songs. It was quite hard, but we had learned from our first album that the vocals are the most important part of a song - the music supports the vocals."
Where did you find the vocalists, apart from Earl Zinger and the legendary Terry Callier?
"We met Cecilia (Stalin, vocals on Waltz for Koop and Baby - DR) in the Uppsala club scene and have been friends ever since. Mikael (Sundin, sings on Tonight - DR) is actually a guitarist who rarely sings, even though he has a great voice. He was a bit nervous at first but after we got a couple of beers in him he was fine, heheh. And Yukimi (Nagano, vocals on Summer Sun and Bright Nights - DR) is a singer we met at a jazz talent contest where we were deejaying. She's the singer of a band called Octagon Session. She also sings when we play live."
There's a track on the album called Relaxin' at Club F****n. What's that all about?
"Heheh, the 'F****n' means 'fusion', but since we think 'fusion' is a dirty word, we spelled it this way. It's a joke, actually. Our favourite club in Stockholm is Club Fusion, it's owned by a friend of ours, Mad Mats. This is where we usually hang out. We thought we'd tease him a little bit."
You really do hate all the big jazz clichés, don't you?
"Well, most of them, yes. But especially the fusion stuff, what we talked about earlier. It's just killing the music."
So no pipe smoking, goatees, black turtle necks, finger snapping and Sartre reading for Koop?
"Ha ha, nope! Well, Magnus has a goatee, but he also has a Mohican, so he can keep the goatee. I'd force him to shave though, if it wasn't for the Mohican. As for the turtle necks, we are V-neck people, so no, thank you. I actually wrote an essay on Sartre, but I must admit I haven't read all that much by him. Magnus is the existentialist. He says Dostojewski was the first acid-jazz writer, ha ha! Um, maybe you shouldn't write that, heh. The finger snapping, well, I prefer applauding. But not for solos!
You forgot the jazz slang! We use the slang, oh yes. But we translate the American slang literally to Swedish, which sounds really cool."
Waltz for Koop is out on Jazzanova-Compost Records.
Koop will be playing in Europe in August, and North America in September/October (with Jazzanova). Check the website for tour schedules.
http://www.kindamuzik.net/interview/koop/koop/1795/
Meer Koop op KindaMuzik: http://www.kindamuzik.net/artiest/koop
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