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Jonas Hellborg

Jonas Hellborg

News

  • The Concert of Europe; An Interview with Jonas Hellborg, by No Treble
  • Uniting Nations – Interview by Anil Prasad, Innerviews
  • Painting by Artist Luciana Tamas
  • The Hellborg String by Dogal
  • Swedish TV Documentary

To Jonas Hellborg music is not simply entertainment, it is necessary for our balance and well being as humans, his devotion in pursuing this concept defining his well over four decades international music career with some of the leading exponents of jazz, Indian and western classical music.

Labeled as innovator and rule breaker, he simply takes the shortest, most direct way to essence and truth, even if that means banishing tabus or inferior standards, putting minds out of their comfort zone.

The way he came to the music world's attention with a solo performance at the Montreux Jazz Festival in 1981 is evidence of that. From an electric bass player, this was at the time unheard of. It was as well following another first in history, Hellborg's first solo album in 1979, quite unthinkable for those days, a record featuring solely electric bass.

With all the generations of musicians following in his footsteps, one could easily define Jonas Hellborg as the original electric bass soloist. Still, that would be ignoring the largest body of his work, as a group leader pushing the boundaries of improvised music into an area that can be best described as collective composition in real time.

Closely connected to the compositional universe is Mr. Hellborg's constant concern for sound improvement - of his own equipment and recordings, as much as the general audience's music experience. He's been involved in design and electronics since the beginning of his music career, searching for new (or even old forgotten) ways to make the best possible sound available to the music listener.

When everyone else is opting for the convenience of recording on computers, he spent the last 15 years building an audiophile recording studio centered around seven Studer analog tape recorders. These were rebuilt with the help of some of the world's greatest audio electronics minds, following quality factors like resolution and bandwidth which are both severely limited in the digital format - which unfortunately, for convenience reasons, forces both the creator and the audience to accept inferior sound quality.

The least though not last of Hellborg's pioneering quests, which opens up a new bundle of threads related to the way music industry worked and works and how it affects listeners and artists, is founding his own record label back in the '80s already, under the name Day Eight Music (DEM), and continued today by Bardo Records

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