Happy 100th anniversary, Svend Asmussen! – Swedish daily newspaper

Svend Asmussen at the Copenhagen Jazz Festival 2006. Photo: Svend With Felt / AOP

on his 90th birthday , he published his autobiography, which of course did entitled “June nights”. In Sweden, the Danish violinist best known for his collaboration with Alice Babs and Ulrik Neumann group Swe-Danes.

He has also collaborated with, among others, Josephine Baker, Benny Goodman, Duke Ellington, Lionel Hampton, Victor Borge and Putte Wickman.

During the Copenhagen jazz festival 2005 the jazzkeyboardisten Joe Sawinul his concert and turned to a gray-haired man in the audience asked him to stand up so that the audience was able to pay tribute to “the excellent Svend Asmussen.”

Swe-Danes was formed in 1958 and the trio hit in Germany and the United States. Three years kept the trio together before long tours away from families made the split inevitable.

Svend Asmussen began always its concerts with the US ever green “June Night” and stated this in an interview DN 2005: “of course it’s touching to the song associated with me. June Night is something promising, fragrant and innovative. It is light and tall and magnificent. And I’ve been through thousands of those nights in my artist. “

Svend Asmussen was born February 28, 1916 in Copenhagen. He gave a concert the age of twelve, when he in 1928 played “Singin ‘in the Rain”, long before Gene Kelly was a hit with the song in the movie of the same name in 1952.

He was not keen when bebop breakthrough in the mid-1940s and took away the dance from jazz. “Jazz was all about entertaining people. And it was entertaining, it was not a good jazz musician, according to the orthodox. But you get on a stage and charge for it, you get set up to entertain people. “

As recently as six months ago interviewed Svend Asmussen in the Danish Radio P1 and told how he looked at age, “I have really never speculated about my age. But I think I will do. “He wonders, however, whether the high age may have something to do with that every day he ate some honey.

Five years ago, he suffered a small stroke which made he can no longer play his beloved violin. The right arm hangs no longer. “The right arm is the artist and the left arm is the artisan”, as Svend Asmussen said in the radio interview.