BIO/STORIES

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Beginnings - Path of least Resistance - My name is Anders Nilsson, I am Mr. Andy Hot. One of the most FAQ sent my way is “how do you say your name?” It’s pronounced [Ahndurs], with the A sort of hard. It’s a highly common name in the Nordic countries where it, according to Norse mythology means “man” or “male”, lucky me. I grew up in Eslöv, Sweden, a town of about 20,000 people in the southern part, Skåne. My parents, Ingvar and Karin, still live in the house where I grew up. They are kind and hard-working people, two qualities that go for the rest of my family too. Ingvar is a mechanical engineer and Karin works with numbers. They like travelling, cooking, tending to the garden and probably quite a few other things too. They both have meticulous, conscientious personalities, are articulate, good listeners, and when they embark on something they generally follow through with intention and patience. Gratefully I’m able to say they’ve always encouraged me in my pursuits. At 2 years of age, I got a kid brother named Peter, and we developed a report that keeps growing to this day. My grandparents had a farm about 7 miles away that was a lot of fun to go to. I am very lucky to have come up under such pleasant conditions.

My father used to strum some guitar on tunes like “House of the Rising Sun” and my mother used to play some piano. Some fond memories of music they listened to include Glen Campbell, Elvis Presley, The Beatles, Creedence Clearwater Revival, ABBA and a few other Swedish acts such as The Boppers and Trasan & Banarne. Culturally, traditional folkloric Nordic music is largely shoved under the rug by the natives and treated as a museum piece. Upon hearing it is a kid I thought it was silly, ancient and irrelevant compared to what thrilled me then. Later in life, after having distanced myself from my native soil, it started meaning more. When you are in 3rd grade in the Swedish school system, you can pick up recorder, which I did. At the end of that first year you get tested on your musical ABC’s, knowledge/labelling of notes & rhythms, ear - repeat after me etc, and get to list 3 desired instruments to check out the following year. 1 gets selected based on your rating and the availability of slots. My first choice was piano but my score wasn’t good enough for that, so I got my second choice - guitar.

The choice of guitar obviously had to do with seeing it in the surroundings - at home, on TV, album covers, enjoying its sound and design. Everybody and his grandmother has one lying around. From age 10 on I took weekly lessons, enjoyed it enough, didn’t practice too much, homework didn’t require much effort, but I was luckily influenced by an older friend who showed my things and kept raising the bar, along with my awareness of things. I listened to, and had posters on my wall of, AC/DC, ZZ Top, Deep Purple, Metallica, Led Zeppelin and so on. Through music school a teacher got a few of us into a “rock band” that I named Riff Raff (after the AC/DC song) which of course was very exciting and eye-opening. We had a lot of fun in the basement of the school and played a few “shows” during those years. By this time my brother started playing drums, and an insatiable appetite for more and more music was established and continued to evolve between us.

Teenager - In fretful Evasion. Around age 13 I was introduced to the fretboard frenzy of fellow Swede Yngwie J. Malmsteen (Yngve Malmsten un-hottified) whose angry and blazing harmonic minor scale shredding made a huge impression on me. He was my guitar god and had made it big in the States. For me he left the other athletic guitarists of the 80’s like Joe Satriani and even Steve Vai in the dust. I picked some of his licks off of the ”Rising Force” and “Marching Out” albums and on December 10th 1988, at age 14, went to see his band play at Olympen in Lund. It was the first big rock ‘n roll show of my life. Well, that killed my interest in him and his music, all I could hear was an overabundance of distorted guitar blurring the notes and too much showing off - guitar tossing, picks for the audience etc. He also had a cheesy American singer and they played a few of their poppier hits. I felt that the aim of the performance was to please the masses through those types of cosmetics and sing-a-long-friendly familiarity as opposed to playing some music that is gripping and intriguing. Over the years my attitude towards the art of music hasn’t changed that much.

During this time I was skimming through “Guitar Player” magazines and was exposed to more eclectic music; American blues such as Muddy Waters, Stevie Ray Vaughan, Jimi Hendrix, and Frank Zappa’s various works. Some of Zappa’s music got to me like nothing else had before, mind-boggling things were going on. One of the first ones I got my hands on was “Ship arriving too late to save a drowning Witch”. Besides the sounds and singing making me baffle and laugh, his music made me question and wonder what is allowed in music and how far one can take it. Around this time I hated jazz and didn’t want to hear it because my ego was still in the rock camp, but through a teacher; saxophonist Per Bäcker, I was gradually introduced to it. Around 1989 the most visible jazz was called fusion, so I got into it through some Swedish guitar players: Anders “Chico” Lindvall and Ulf Wakenius, and listening to my first Miles Davis LP “Decoy” with John Scofield digging into his kinky phrasing on it which I loved. Within a short span of time I was hooked on saxophone master Charlie Parker and later John Coltrane. Per also successfully led a big band at the school which was a lot of fun to be in, and I’m glad the opportunity arose to play in a large ensemble at that early age. It was getting clear to me that I wanted to be a musician, a very good one.

Turning point - Set on this simple goal and fueled by thirst for knowledge I went on to a Music High School in the city of Malmö for 2 years, between ages 16-18, and started practicing and transcribing solos pretty intensely. My ear and comprehension were developing, and I was focusing on the vertical/ horizontal language and syntax of music - harmonic and melodic ideas especially. My guitar teacher at the time, Thomas Hallberg, gave me a lot of good stuff to work on and he could see the hunger and stubborn one-sided nature of my increasingly chromatic efforts. During one memorable lesson he asked me to “play something without thinking”… It was confusing, challenging, and rewarding at the same time, and it was a break from what prior absorbed my mind. I needed to hear that. The mental focus on melodic/harmonic/rhythmic materials had to be balanced by ebb and flow, tension/release, simplicity/complexity, spontaneity/gravity, and the way to accomplish this was to take a step back, slow down the process, simplify the content, listen, and enjoy, in short… - connect. This mindset relaxed me, and the attachment to what I was doing on the guitar changed. That lesson opened me up and I realized that it wouldn’t be the same any more, so thanks Thomas! A fond memory from this time is watching David Lynch’s cult-classic “Twin Peaks” on Swedish TV which I was hooked on in ‘91 along with my mom. This was the first time I found myself enthralled by events taking place in layers, levels, and hidden subcurrents, it blew my mind.

Merely playing the Part - As high school ended I was admitted right away to a “jazz studies” program at Malmö Academy of Music and moved to my first apartment. It’s a 4-year program, which at any time in life is a very long time to study at a school. Although this fairly large institution has a grey tone of sleepwalking and stuffiness where every day seems to be replayed, I did learn from a few teachers, especially saxophonist Helge Albin, who like me felt suffocated in this environment. “Don’t play before the feeling” he said. I continued practicing and immersing myself in music on my own, and jammed with fellow students. I was eating up a lot of different music from the library and buying a plethora of recordings including early 20th century music, mostly jazz after 1960, especially Coltrane’s, Nordic jazz (fjälljazz) on ECM Records like Terje Rypdal, Jan Garbarek, Allan Holdsworth’s music and on and on, almost exclusively in Western and African-American traditions. I was curious about “new music” and often went to concerts held by Ars Nova at the Academy. But, focusing on jazz music made my ego belong to the jazz camp for now. Although my late teen-early 20’s existence was fairly absent-minded and secluded, like a developing moth, I did make quite a few friends including saxophonist Mattias Carlson, and got a few things in life started. I took a break after 3 years, to work in the band of a theatre group and to study a little psychology at the University in Lund, after which I came back and finished the last year of my college education with improved focus.

The Luxury of Choice - After college, it was certainly time to act. No longer could postponing making a living for myself go on so I started giving guitar lessons, part-time, I also got offered random jobs as a guitarist here and there. For a while now I had been enjoying playing regularly in a free-form band called ”Control of Space”. We rehearsed in a recording studio and taped countless sessions. Playing and listening back really helped develop my ability to hear ”the bigger picture”. Sven Andersson played sax, David Carlsson bass, and Martin Brandqvist drums/alto sax. Between 1995-1998, we played frequently and developed something quite unique I thought, although we only did about 2 gigs in 3 years. A favorite hobby of the band was pinball. David and I continued experimenting with bizarre electronic effects in a duo imaginatively named “AD”. My interest in improvisation and its possibilities led to meeting saxophonists Mats Gustafsson and Martin Küchen, and the only flexicord player on the planet Herman Müntzing, Martin Klapper, Andreas Axelsson, and trips to Berlin where I made some friends including percussionist Burkhard Beins In ’99-’00 I participated in a few improvised music festivals in Stockholm and was sort of exploring an unpredictable and non-compliant attitude to making music. Following the path of more resistance I wanted to be anti-niche, identity-fleeing/seeking in a love-hate relationship with the known. My ego was for the time being finding a nest in the Angst camp of expression, where the elements don’t mix very well and the playground was too small. It’s a dissonant place, but pushing myself into a corner was a very good personal extreme to face. In the summer of ‘99 my brother and I also went to New York and got really turned on and upbeat at the Bell Atlantic Jazz Festival taking place at the Knitting Factory.

Johnny come lately - When deciding to move to New York City in 2000 I had visited the city 4-5 times. I was attracted to the lively and edgy improvisational music scene and had made a few friends on it and I felt inspired to immerse myself in this type of culture. I started playing with a group called “East 3rd Street Ensemble”. They were getting together once a week in the east village to make music on the very block where SunRa used to reside, Slug’s Saloon used to be further down the street. This was Free Jazz ground. This encounter was very important to me and I continued playing with them weekly for about 2-3 years. The group included Sabir Mateen on horns, Matt Heyner on bass, David Gould on drums, James Duncan on trumpet at first, and later Ras Moshe and Matt Lavelle on horns. The first jam knocked me off my feet as I felt I had blown my load pretty quickly, while the music kept on rising. A general difference from the jams I was used to back home was the level of intensity, density and affection. These players kept the music fueled by continously playing and interjecting complementary chapters and interlacing voices. It was a flow of ever-changing sound that one had to find and relate to somehow. Quickly I realized that whatever accumulated knowledge I brought in withme, my ear and musicianship ammo weren’t enough, or necessarily even relevant to what was coming at me here. Starting to realize that that type of information was not to rely on, but rather to bypass and jump off of with all you’ve got, bothc hallenged and gradually opened me up to approaches other than those within my comfort zone. It’s up to the player to put personal shields aside and allow for open expression and contribution, say something. In Alice Coltrane’s words - ”You have to give something”. Music has to be felt, it is vibrations. In the case of improvising collectively with this group the spirit was to boldly and freely express yourself, burst open and keep expressing yourself. The message here is: “You are the Music!”

Pungent punk - Right after September 11thhappened I flew to Sweden to do a short tour with a band called “NoTone” consisting of Herman Müntzing on bass & flexicord, Henrik Frisk on reeds, Peter Nilsson on drums and myself on guitar. The tour was a double whammy of us and Marilyn Crispell Trio with Anders Jormin and Raymond Strid. Our improvised flights were like fairly abstract dramas. Although the instrumentation was jazzy and standard, the result was definitely not cliche. We were pushing and pulling all over the place! Returning to New York was a different experience, the city was hurt, and on top of that the Bush era was starting to really take form and the incredible madness was irritating and affecting everybody.

Everyday Fluke - I was living in an apartment on the west side in Harlem, had 2 roommates who were studying music at CCNY like me. Recieved my Master’s degree there and although it was a jazz program the focus was more on Western classical music, sonata forms, vocabulary, etc than anything else. I was getting a kick out of private guitar lessons with Gene Bertoncini, who was familiar from one of my favorite albums - Wayne Shorter’s “Odyssey of Iska”. He is a very experienced and great solo performer, and I picked up some useful attitudes and ideas from him, it was a lot of fun. In our apartment we would have jam sessions in the living room and I got to meet and play witha whole bunch of people this way, some of whom remain present day collaborators - omnipresent reedman Daniel Carter, bassists Kermit Driscoll, Ken Filiano, Francois Grillot, drummers Jeff Arnal, Lou Grassi. While in the process of dropping names, here are some other people I’ve had the pleasure of performing with - Raoul Björkenheim, Dean Bowman, Perry Robinson, Eugene Chadbourne , William Parker , Roy Campbell , Hamid Drake, Alex Obert, Darius Jones and Aaron Dugan .

Break all the Rules - In 2002 I was hanging out with Matt Heyner one day and met Mr. Tom Bruno. Tom and I were introduced playing for change in the subway station of Astor Place. I had never before played in a setting like that, but the two of us did it many, many times there, and at Times Square (a tough spot), Penn Station, and my favorite one - Grand Central Station. Tom’s drumming style is quite personal and intriguing, and he takes solos like nobody else, Mr. Free. Playing with Tom and playing in the subway liberated me. When you’re out there you have got to project and keep it up, play from the gut. He also encouraged getting inspiration from everywhere around you, wherever it may be, in whatever form. I found it a great stamina builder and my facility of expression improved. Gradually my playing was getting more dramatic, spiky, bluesy and independent. Also, out there in “the street” you gotta have a sense of humor, be “merry and bright” which Tom inspired. There is a recording of us playing a gig available, it’s called “Bootleg 1? on cd-r. Other collaborators at this time, and still, include saxophonist Ras Moshe, who’s ongoing work on the scene is an inspiration. His playing and writing is both beautiful and raw from the Heart. Trumpeter/Bass clarinet player Matt Lavelle writes music like nobody else, totally different from mine. The core of his sound, the search, along with a vivid imagination makes him a stand-out player. By now I was feeding the monkey on my back hungry on pulp fiction and film noir.

Consistently inconsistent - Another collaborator and idea man withwhomI crossed paths was Evan Gallagher, keyboardist/composer. The two of us got together to have Indian food, and soon we were coming up with pretty wacky compositions. His mind works differently from anyone I’ve met, very imaginative. A true gentleman, he instinctually would find a way to “fix” a melody or rhythm to make it less straight or stock, more individual. The way he thinks influenced me in my thinking about things. Soon our sessions turned into attempts at playing his music and the results tended to turn out as a fine mash of grooves and ”fixed” grooves, quirky melodic and harmonic usage and the whole thing had a quality of what he liked to call “stylistic consistency”. The titles are also an extension of this trait, for example “vRysch Ort’T {no `N´} s’W(we) t’T for guitar”. Years later, I’ve been asked to play pieces of his, which is always a hilarious and daunting experience. When you hear of an Evan Gallagher concert anywhere near you, go.

Zelig tickled Pink - Pianist Sebastian Schunke and I met in New York and became good friends. He lives in Berlin and has pulled together quite special groups, often involving a Cuban rhythmic dialect and melancholy lyrical style. Several times, I’ve been invited to perform with his band in Germany and on the West Coast and to play on 2 recordings of his. ”Mouvement” was made in ‘03 at Tonstudio Bauer and generously includes a version of my tune “Reminders”. The second one “Back in New York” from ‘08 features Paquito D’Rivera on clarinet. Contact with Cuban rhythms was a new chapter for yours truly, and inspired taking a plunge into the rhythmic languages and musics all over the planet. Feeling like an eternal rookie is a wonderful surrender. At present NorthAfrican, Spanish, Turkish, Indian, Japanese and Iranian music that I’ve ran into are all traditions of interest, along with the bigger picture of cultures and history of its environment.

Marooned with heaving Pockets of Hair - After returning from an eventful summer in Sweden in 2003 (see more on AORTA page) I was starting on a new foot in New York. I was enticed into “Angelblood”, a kind of crazy Metal band with one foot in the visual arts world, replacing guitarist Mick Barr starting with a show at the DeStijl festival in Minneapolis. Later we played at European festivals a couple of times, ATP was one. It was a band with various edges and clashes that made the performances have their own charge. Musically it brought me back to my early days, and I was embracing the metal guitar angle happily. To me there is no dissonance anymore between the worlds of improvisation and playing pre-set music, music that attracts me and that I can stretch in that is. For example free jazz and heavy metal can connect through their expressiveness. I had an Aha experience as a teen hearing Kerry King of Slayer play solos that are seemingly tonedeaf and cacophonic, totally independent of the song structure and beat. As soon as the solo is over he returns to the groove. The drummer in Angelblood was Dave Nuss, of “No Neck Blues Band”, who after it disbanded started the band “Under Satan’s Sun”. The design was two female singers (sisters Silvie Jensen & Chloe Puke), two guitars (George DeVoe and me), Arik Roper on bass, and Dave on drums, compositions, lyrics. Although the two bands differ greatly, the melodic nature of the songs, male/female line-up, and the metal type of arrangements are common bonds. Both bands can be heard on recordings available along with more information through Sound at One. Next, Dave and I have collaborated on his massive project “Original Innocence”. More stories to follow about that one.

It’s the frame growing larger - In 2005 it was time to leave the Harlem space and move to Brooklyn. As a consequence I started hanging out with Brooklyn people, the borough is endless. One of my favorite local places is a bar called Barbés, that has a backroom with nightly entertainment. Quite a lot of the NY music scene lives in these bars. By now I was playing pretty regularly on the scene. Aside from playing the instrument and the music at hand well, a facet of performing that I hadn’t given enough attention to started surfacing and demand rethinking. There were times when I felt like a caged animal. As opposed to using our instruments as tools for contact-surfaces with the exterior world(s), a lot of musicians fall into using their instrument as a shield and safety zone. Excuses such as “I need to concentrate”, and variations of the same are all the same - subterfuge. Thanks to playing in the hectic subways I had been able to take a personal first step beyond a line of introverted focus/uptight exterior. Rather, playing was by now an energizing, open, and giving action. Finally I had to laugh at myself and this invisible wall I had built up as it started disappearing. A lot of this shield-business has to do with expectations and a character that ”needs” to be lived up to, as if the only way is to “be yourself” is by putting on a mask in order to be somebody. If you listen to a speech given in a “scientific” or “technical” way, you as an audience member will also receieve it on that level. Compare that to a speaker appearing “spontaneous and engaging”. The impression is very different, and chances are you’ll walk away feeling like you’ve had an experience rather than getting some information. These days, to me, a successful gig is one where there is connectivity, release, and sharing.

Instrument beyond the instrument - With this experience of this enlarging frame comes the realization that music itself is a surface of sorts. I like to see it as vibrations or “pockets” of vibrations. Pitch, rhythm, and tone color all mesh in this regard. The instrument is playing itself. Beyond the physical instrument and the know-how there is another instrument of wavelengths and vibrations being played and playing with you. If music is a present dynamic energy field, musicians take jabs at, and manipulate this field of responsive energy. Seen this way, making music is like dealing with qualities rather than ideas. All instruments and voices can associate with this organic relationship and through them we tickle the Muse from multiple angles. It’s like anything else.

Getting rid of ready mades - In my practice these days I slow the process down and put things under the magnifying glass. A luxury of practicing is that you can observe what you are doing, and break things down. It’s useful to take an entity or idea such as a chord apart, and use very small amounts of material to see what you can make with only the minimum. In the process of this type of work you may also find out what your “default” solutions are. These trained responses supply us with “choices” and back-up when it’s a real life playing situation. Out of all the ocean of possibilities I know of only a few. Finding out that simplicity is not simple is a great lesson.