Jesper Lund Jakobsen (Kontrabass Balalaika)

Jesper Lund Jakobsen was born in April 1973. He grew up in a family that played music for dear life. As a child it was classical music, Russian music, Danish and other Nordic traditionals that filled the everyday. By 8 years old he started in The Tivoli Boys Guard and it was marching music, musicals, Lumbye and Gade that was on the agenda.

Through several years of playing in brass- and concert bands, where he developed his skills on classical percussion, he listened – like all other teenagers – to contemporary pop and played air guitar to old and new rock bands. In those years his interest for the acoustic guitar grew, he played pop on the piano and sang loud and from the heart. In 1988 he returned to his family orchestra Pavlovskis Balalaika Orchestra and worked as a Janitshar until, in the middle of the 90’s fate would have it, he borrowed one of their basses; The Kontrabass Balalaika!

With this in hand, he got an opportunity to play a completely different type of music, and together with the circus orchestra The Penguin Band he tripped out for some years.
This band played and developed folk music-psychadelic – very acoustic and ecological – and as the notes little by little fell into place he began to write music for a solo album which was released in 2001; “Dreamfalls”.

Some years after in 2004 the second solo album “Migrant Birds” (Trækfuglene) was released and performative music became more of a profession. Alongside the album projects he played Swing-Jazz in different constellations, and with the group Swing of Sahara he developed what was called Balk 'n' Roll – a style of music that fuses all sorts of elements of all sorts of old and new gypsy-rock world music.

Klezmofobia currently has JLJ's big focus on the development of progressive Klezmer – but the Russian music somehow remains a stepping stone or scaffold in many of his activities and in much of his musical understanding.