Soren Bebe Trio delivers a mix of judicious jazz with melodious New Age-like piano

This post represents another first for me: content that is entirely about music.

In my profile narrative on the right side of the main blog page, I explain how I usually use the blog to chronicle my periodic photo shoots. And for the longest time, I also used to mention how the blog could change directions in the future.

In the past year, I’ve made a few direction changes from the usual photo-shoot-chronicling, and today’s post is yet another deviation.

There have been so many bad things I’ve encountered using social media in recent years, so a fortuitous turn four months ago or thereabouts has had me wanting to share a story about how the discovery of contemporary musicians who are new to me has been a delight and comfort. And the process of how these artists, in turn, “found” me, might be the start of a social media trend.

An increasing number of fledgling artists or musicians who have tired of record labels who don't support them enthusiastically are using Facebook and Instagram (and perhaps other social media) to promote their work through self-produced ads usually containing sample clips of their music.

That’s how I learned about the Søren Bebe Trio, a Danish combo that features Bebe on piano and various musicians on drums and bass. I guess I can best describe their music as a melding of judicious light jazz with melodious New Age piano. My love of New Age piano — which goes back to the early 1990s — no doubt explains why I even elected to check out the trio’s ad when I first came upon it on Facebook in June. 

The ad was sampling the title track of the trio’s 2019 album Echoes.

If you are on social media and have seen or heard these ads, you know the musicians try to entice viewers/listeners by offering a free CD (of the artist’s choosing) if the buyer pays only a $5 shipping cost. When a customer pursues the offer and clicks on the link taking them to the purchase page, the artist further entices the buyer by offering them additional albums of their music at considerable discounts or in discounted packages. And the artist offers to sign the discs, for an extra couple bucks. 

I was suspicious at first, but the Søren Bebe Trio music was so appealing to me, I didn’t run away. The artists explain that their motivation to offer free and discounted CDs is to get more people to hear their music and to enable them to have a personal connection with those people.

In all honesty, the trio wasn’t the first artist I purchased from after coming across a teaser ad like this. That distinction goes to singer, songwriter and folk rocker Beth Bombara, from whom I bought the sampler CD and two others, and I liked them all.

That’s why I decided to trust what I heard in the sampler for the Søren Bebe Trio. I loved the Echoes snippet that Bebe put on his social media ad. The trio’s jazz elements most often are light, and the New Age elements give the tracks appealing melodies that are easy on the ear.

  

I took a big leap and ordered five of the trio’s discs, and I was not disappointed. So I ordered a sixth, seventh and eighth, and I hit pay dirt in that I liked them all! I'm listening to the trio as I compose this post. That’s Søren you see in the lead-off photo and above, which he provided and granted me permission to use.

The trio has now released eight CDs: Searching (January 2008), From Out Here (January 2010), A Song for You (August 2012), Eva, featuring Marc Johnson (August 2013), Home (November 2016), Echoes (May 2019), Here Now (November 2023) and First Song (May 2024). I’ve listened to them all multiple times now, thinking I ought to find something I could criticize. But I can’t.

It should be noted that Bebe didn’t always use the same accompanying musicians on his early albums. If he did, I’d mention them by name here, too. But his four most recent discs have settled into a combo featuring Kasper Tagel on bass and either Anders Mogensen or Knut Finsrud on drums/brushes. 

Bebe has a wonderful handle on putting melodious piano in front of his bass and drums/brushes background. And sometimes, the bass and drums remain silent, and I’m perfectly fine with that. At times when I’m listening to those solo piano tunes, I feel like I’m back in the 1990s when I “discovered” New Age piano on the Windham Hill and Narada record labels. 

When I use the New Age comparison to Bebe’s work I mean that in a highly complimentary way. And I took the trouble to say that right here because I know New Age often gets a bad rap from music snobs. But for me, New Age piano rarely disappoints. Off the top of my head, I’m thinking George Winston, Wayne Gratz, Michael Jones, David Lanz, Liz Story, Kevin Kern, Eric Tingstad, Joe Yamada and Jim Brinkman. 

Søren Bebe’s melodious compositions on piano are right up there in quality and appeal, but with a delightful addition of tasteful jazz elements.

I was so bowled over by the trio’s catalog of albums that I dropped Søren a note telling him so, and after a few days, he answered my email to thank me and added a personal note. So there you are: I went through the whole process that buyers go through when reaching out to artists through their teaser ads, and I can attest that at least in Søren’s case, the artist is true to his/her word about establishing a personal rapport with the listening public.

At the beginning, my favorite track in the catalog was Free, Free, Set Them Free from the A Song for You album. Its unusual offbeat syncopation piqued my interest, and I came back to it often. But lately, my favorites have been the title track of A Song for You and an entrancing cover of Sospiri, Op. 70, Sir Edward Elgar's World War I adagio for string orchestra. Sospiri is the last track on Echoes.

On Thursday — just yesterday — an excited Bebe sent an email to people on his group list to inform us that he had just learned that he had been nominated for his first Danish Music Awards in the category of Jazz Composer of the Year for the 2023 album Here Now. A winner will be announced Dec. 9.

“Regardless of the outcome,” he said, “I am extremely happy, proud and honored to be nominated. And then together with such insanely talented colleagues, for whom I have the greatest respect.

“But composing the music is one thing. Another and even more important thing is bringing it to life. And I owe everything to my two amazing band members, bassist Kasper Tagel and drummer Knut Finsrud, who do an incredibly amazing job, both on the album and at concerts.”

For some years, Bebe had composed music for ballet performers, but he said recently in a separate email just to me that he has stopped doing that for all practical purposes.

“I haven’t played for classes in eight years and have no intention of going back,” he said. “I occasionally compose and release a new song or two for ballet but don’t intend to do more full length albums as I want to focus on the trio and other solo projects. However I have released a substantial amount of records for ballet classes. More than 20 I would say, including sheet music. That’s all I did for quite some years to make a living before the trio music really took over.”

Bebe recently made available to people on his email list a CD from a recording he made 12 years ago with a five-member combo, and I also purchased it. The album, Gone, released in 2014, features Bebe and Tagel along with Jakob Buchanan on trumpet and flugelhorn, Julian Arguilles on saxophones and Helge Andreas Norbakken on percussion. 

Gone is another very fine work. It includes two tracks  — Maria and Again and Again from the Søren Bebe Trio’s A Song for You album — that I found interesting to hear with Buchanan and Arguilles’ horns in play. But I’ve had Gone only a short while — not nearly enough to grow completely familiar with all the tracks — and so far I prefer Bebe’s sound with the trio. Who knows, the horn-infused sound might grow stronger with me. 

I went through the same process with the next artist I fell for after checking out a social media teaser ad, Nicholas Krolak, an American, a stand-up bassist from Philadelphia. And I initially had the same experience as I had with Soren, although something about Krolak told me not go beyond the first disc. But I loved the music on that disc (except for three tunes that had vocals), and I dropped him a personal note with my compliments. He responded.

Krolak’s compositions on that CD are more traditional jazz, but not overbearing. It’s stuff I can enjoy. So I took a gamble and ordered three other discounted discs by him. Alas, when I listened to those three, I quickly understood why he had been referring to his repertoire in previous emails as “a sonic experience.” The second batch of discs were not nearly as appealing. Kind of hard to describe. They were approaching abstract because of their absence of structure and continuity.

I did the same thing with yet another artist named Andrew Colyer, whose Facebook teaser ad screamed New Age piano all over the place. I liked the tune he used for his teaser ad, and the disc it was on (I ordered just that one) was fine. But when I took a gamble and ordered two others, including a Christmas album, I didn’t care for either one. Like the second batch of Krolak CDs, Colyer’s two other CDs I ordered were “sonic experiences.”

If you’re inferring that “sonic experience(s),” at least in my case, means it’s not a good thing, you are correct. At least for my personal taste.

And so because of the experience with Krolak and Colyer, I’ve backed away from those teaser ads for the time being.

But I’m still thrilled I found Søren Bebe Trio. Play on, Søren!

The one Thanksgiving that was different

For many years, Thanksgivings had always been a very pleasant time for our family in Indianapolis to get together and enjoy a traditional feast and each other’s company. 

The one exception to this was 2016, when the holiday landed in the wake of what I felt was this country’s worst-ever decision for electing a new president of the United States. For the first time that I can recall, the subject of politics surfaced in our discussions at the Thanksgiving get-together that year. 

One family member who enjoys needling people started it by needling me because he knew I detested the Republican candidate, who I shall not name. It’s true; everyone in the family knew how I felt.

As a career newspaperman, for years I’d made a point to stay on top of current events and explore topics below the radar of most people. So long before Election Day, I’d formed an opinion on the 2016 Republican candidate for President based on:

*** His history of demonstrations of greed (even to the point of slighting people in his own family)

*** His insatiable appetite for the public spotlight

*** His failed casino investments and ensuing bankruptcies

*** His shafting of small contractors on his casino construction projects

*** His association with an attorney with lengthy known ties to the mob

*** A superiority/me-first complex perfectly fitting the classic definition of narcissism

I feel that such a person should never be installed in a position of power and authority as a national president. 

Did the Democratic candidate have her faults? Yes, but I also knew she would never do anything to undermine our democracy as I feared could happen with the power-hungry Republican. Another family member, bless him, mentioned his distaste of both candidates for the two major party candidates, so he took the Switzerland route and voted for the Libertarian candidate. As he explained at our Thanksgiving Day get-together, he also felt strongly about the Libertarian Party philosophy that promotes civil liberties, non-interventionism, laissez-faire capitalism and limiting the size and scope of government.

I happened to opine how taking such a course wasn’t risky in most elections, but the 2016 election was not like most elections. I explained why the election outcome presented an existential threat to the country, and that in this instance country before personal ideology should have been paramount.

The family member who started this ruckus in the first place told me the country needs to give the new guy a chance. By this time, the discussion had transitioned to mid-level argument, so the women stepped in and told us to nip it in the bud (apologies to Mayberry Sheriff’s Deputy Barney Fife). 

It might seem otherwise, but this whole lively “debate” transpired over just 15 minutes or so, and thankfully, calm was restored in relatively short order.

I do not feel smug today even though my worst fears in 2016 proved to be correct, given all that happened in the previous president’s administration. It was a toilet bowl term that began with large tax cuts for big corporations and the richest Americans, though the administration tried to masquerade it as a boon to average citizens. 

The former president’s botched handling of the COVID pandemic is also high up on the list of utter failures. But his signature transgressions were the false claims of illegal voting during the 2020 election and his tragic attempt to undermine democracy and violate the Constitution — not to mention the laws of the land — in the Jan. 6, 2021, attempted insurrection at the U.S. Capitol. And make no mistake, that was an attempted insurrection, replete with loss of lives (plural). People today forget about the loss of lives ... or conveniently choose to overlook them.

This is all a prelude to the real purpose of this post, which is to share a current op ed column by John J. Pitney Jr., a professor of American politics at Claremont McKenna College. From 1989-91, he was deputy director of research at the Republican National Committee.

His column appears below, topped by the headline that appeared with it Thursday in my local daily newspaper, the Raleigh (N.C.) News & Observer. He speaks with more clarity on the subject than I could have:

I’m a ‘Never Trump’ conservative who voted third party in 2016. Here’s why I won’t make that mistake this time.

Some right-leaning voters who oppose Donald Trump are thinking of voting neither for him nor Kamala Harris.

I understand how they feel. In 2016, I published an article urging Never Trump conservatives to consider casting their ballot for a third-party candidate. In the election that year, I did just that.

I regret writing that column. I regret casting that vote.

To people like me, Trump represented a repudiation of everything that Ronald Reagan stood for. But as a conservative and former GOP staffer who had never voted for a Democratic presidential candidate, I harbored reservations about Hillary Clinton.

Voting for neither Trump nor Clinton seemed to be a “safe” way to express disapproval of both. Most polls at the time showed her on track to win comfortably. It seemed reasonable to argue that a significant tally for a third-party candidate might check her liberal ambitions. After all, the number of votes for independent candidate Ross Perot in 1992 may have nudged Bill Clinton to accept bigger budget cuts than he wanted.

But the 2016 election did not go according to expectations. Despite losing the national popular vote, Trump squeaked into office by edging out Hillary Clinton in the Electoral College tally, claiming key states where polls were way off the mark.

Libertarian candidate Gary Johnson won 3% of the national vote, a high-water mark for that party. An exit poll asked his supporters whom they would choose in a two-person race. Though many said they would abstain, more picked Clinton than Trump.

We will never know whether Trump would have lost if more such voters had switched to Clinton. We do know what happened because he won. He blew up the federal debt. His incompetent handling of COVID-19 caused tens of thousands of needless deaths. He finished his term by trying to overturn an election he lost and instigating a violent rebellion against the government he had sworn to protect.

Trump turned out to be a catastrophe for our country. Hillary Clinton just was a candidate with whom I disagreed. I wish I had voted for her and encouraged others to do the same.

The next president of the United States will be Donald Trump or Kamala Harris, not anybody else. The election will almost certainly be close. We don't have the luxury of voting third party or writing in the name of a fantasy candidate. (In most states, those write-ins won’t even count.)

Currently, many states are likely to give a lopsided margin to one candidate or the other. For example, California will probably go for Harris and West Virginia for Trump. Voters in such states might think it is OK to skip the election or vote for somebody who can’t win, thinking: “What the heck, it won’t make any difference in the electoral count, right?”

That attitude is wrong in two ways.

First, “likely” does not mean “certain.” As we have already seen, the polls can err. Never Trump folks do not want to wake up on the day after the election to find that their wasted votes have helped him score a narrow upset in their state.

Second, the popular vote matters. Under any circumstance, Trump will almost certainly refuse to accept defeat. But if he loses big in the popular vote, as well as losing the electoral vote, it will be harder for him to claim that he is the people’s choice. The larger the margin, the weaker his claim.

For us Never Trumpers, as for everybody else, the 2024 election is a binary choice.

If you abstain or vote for somebody other than Kamala Harris, you effectively vote for Trump. Consider the consequences for our country. Don’t do something you’ll regret.

Smiles in shooter’s porch photos brightened neighborhood

It was a challenge for photography enthusiasts — both amateurs and professionals — to indulge their hobby or livelihood during the COVID-19 pandemic and state-imposed lock-downs in 2020 and 2021.

I played it extremely safe and did not venture outside the homestead except to seek life-supporting provisions such as food and fuel. Early on in the lock-down here in North Carolina, I dropped a note to the governor’s office asking if a photography enthusiast such as myself might be allowed to photo document the downtown Raleigh landscape — which I expected to be sparsely populated — as long as I observed proper social distancing.

I received no response to my inquiry. So rather than risk a few variable consequences for proceeding with my idea, I stayed home.

This post evolved after Kelley Jordan Schuyler, a professional photographer in Indianapolis, went on the Facebook page of my old neighborhood, Garfield Park-South, during COVID to pitch an idea to help bring some smiles and cheer in the neighborhood to help distract from the gloom and doom: She offered to walk through the neighborhood on a near-future evening to take portraits of residents with their families and/or fur buddies on their porches — and, most important — at a safe distance separating photographer and subject in observance of the community social distancing admonition.

Kelley was a relatively new resident of the neighborhood. I thought hers was a brilliant idea, and the neighborhood responded immediately and positively, so she did a walk-through on May 3, 2020. Not long afterward, she posted some of the photos on the Facebook page and offered to do additional portraits for anyone still interested.

Kelley pitched her idea by characterizing the portraits as “porch photos,” but in most instances, the subjects — as you can see from some of the samples in this post — were not under cover of the porch. They are seated on steps of or to the porch. I certainly understand that; a shooter trying to photograph anyone standing or seated on a porch would have to get close up, which would compromise needed social distancing space in the pandemic.

Kelley no doubt chose early evening for her shoot appointments to allow for almost uniform lighting —shade. She started at 6 p.m., which in Indianapolis meant the sun was low in the sky — which in turn means it was behind buildings, thereby preventing any chance of throwing unwanted white key light on people’s faces if they were facing the western sky.

I contacted Kelley to ask if she would welcome a little splash about the project on this blog, and she agreed enthusiastically.

“I'm delighted by the positive response our neighbors have had to this idea,” she said. “I couldn't tell if people would be skeptical about it, but it looks like I have a lot more work cut out for me — there’s a lot more interest!”

With her permission, I sprinkled this post with a few shots from her first wave of results, posted at the Facebook site Thursday. I found them uplifting. I didn’t want to steal all of her thunder, though. If you’d like to see the full gallery of first-round of porch photos at her site, just follow the link I dropped into this sentence.