Casper Hejlesen on the making of Minimalism
Casper Hejlesen: photo: Bjørn Schou/Universal
The album title Minimalism obviously refers to minimalistic music, which ironically isn’t the case for this album. Minimalism has been - for me - not a style, but more like a mentality that has helped me restraining myself in both terms of composition and improvisation.
The creative process leading up to this album has in general given me more faith in myself as an artist.
I learned – and I am still learning – how to respect the music and the space surrounding it, which basically means that I decided to stop playing to impress people and instead started playing for the sake of playing music.
Little North connection
'Pause' from Minimalism is streaming
The album features some of my good friends, who also happens to be some of the best musicians I know.
The musicians are Swedish/Turkish trumpeter Ruhi Erdogan, the Danish bassist Martin Brunbjerg Rasmussen and the Danish drummer Lasse Jacobsen.
Martin and Lasse are also both members of the critically acclaimed trio, Little North.
Quartet and trio tracks
The album consists of 7 tracks in total, on which four of them are in a quartet format and the rest in trio.
We recorded this album in March 2023 with the great Jacob Schjødt Worm at Finland Studio in Aarhus.
All the songs on the album are written by me. Some of them were new and some of them were older compositions brought back to life in a new disguise.
Country lad
Getting to this point, has been quite a journey. I was born and raised in the countryside in the north of Denmark. Our closest neighbours were several hundred metres away, so I really grew up in a calm environment far away from the city.
My interest in music started when I was around 7 or 8 years old, and it has probably been a result of boredom in the calm countryside. I was listening to loud music while I was drumming with chopsticks on my parents’ pots and pans from the kitchen.
At some point, they decided to buy me a drumkit, because they sensed an obvious musicality.
It has probably also been because they were tired of me destroying their pots and pans.
After playing drums for a year and a half, I fell in love with the guitar after I started listening to bands such as AC/DC and Led Zeppelin. I bought an electric guitar a few days after my 9th birthday and the rest is history.
After my rock phase, I started playing a lot of blues and attended every possible blues jam all around the country. At some point I started opening my eyes for jazz music and it slowly developed from that point.
Bachelor's in Aalborg
When I was 18, I was accepted into the Royal Academy of Music in Aalborg where I did my bachelor’s degree. After living there and being a part of the music scene I decided that it was time to move on.
My teachers kept telling me that I should consider moving to a bigger city, where I could meet and play with equally minded musicians, and where I could get my “ass kicked.”
Released as a single earlier this year Casper's spellbinding 'Waltz van Amsterdam'
Therefore, I ended up moving to Amsterdam in 2021 after getting accepted for the master’s at the Conservatory of Amsterdam.
However, I immediately didn’t feel at home in the city and the music scene wasn’t matching what I wanted to do. Everything was working against me and I felt like I was wrong. I wasn’t feeling inspired, and I was longing for home all the time.
Turn on, tune in, drop out
After a mentally tough year in Amsterdam, I decided to drop out of the school and move to Copenhagen instead, where I was fortunate enough to be accepted at the European Jazz Master programme at the Rhythmic Music Conservatory.
This programme allowed me to do 2 exchange-semesters, where I went to Berlin and Trondheim and gained a really big network of musicians abroad.
Eye opener
I enjoyed Berlin and Trondheim, but Copenhagen and the Rhythmic Music Conservatory has been an eye-opening experience for me, and I got to meet musicians, who were thinking outside of the box and who had the same sense for aesthetics as myself.
Growing interest in improv
Unlike my first album, Overture (2020), Minimalism (Universal Music, Denmark) is a result of a growing interest in improvised Scandinavian music and the use of simplicity and space in my compositions and improvisations.
My music developed from being longer compositions with written down arrangements and forms to become more and more simplistic with a lot of space for personal interpretation, and I started feeling more self-secure about what I was doing.
The word “minimalism” caught my interest, and the word has inspired me to shape a new way of playing and thinking music. As mentioned before, it's not that my music is minimalistic, but it has been gravitating more towards it than earlier on, which has helped me restraining myself and realizing that there might be some truths about the famous expression “less is more.”
Not since the great Jakob Bro have we at marlbank been so taken by such a compelling and distinctive guitarist. The sky's the limit
With all the above being said, I don’t at all consider Minimalism, as being my destination as an artist and composer, but it sure is a big step towards what to expect of my future work as an artist.
My plan from here, is to keep on expanding my musical knowledge and keep on experimenting with different things. I am not afraid of failing in discovering different sides of me, since failure can be a way into improving yourself. I am happy as long as I keep developing.
I have already now started planning my next move and I slowly started preparing for my next album. Besides that, I would at some point like to experiment with multi-instrumentalism, since I have been spending a lot of time behind the drums and the piano recently. In a couple of years, I except myself to release a solo album, where I am playing all the instruments myself. But let’s see how that turns out.
Minimalism (Universal Music, Denmark) is out on Friday 4 October.
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