00:04
Nikolaj Hess
I chose The Red Studio painting or L'Atelier Rouge by Henri Matisse, centered on The Red Studio exhibition at MoMA and SMK.

00:15
Nikolaj Hess
It wasn't red from the beginning. This layer of paint was applied later. When it was done, he painted it red. He changed the whole painting. It had been sitting there as a different painting, different color for quite a while, and then he made a decision and painted it almost all of it red.

00:32
Nikolaj Hess
He had an idea, I don't know what will happen when I do this. And I think that's a very jazz way of seeing things, following that artistic instinct.

00:42
Nikolaj Hess
What does the painting look like as sheet music? I like music that you can just experience and I like art that you can just experience. I have an album called The Red Studio, which is different perspectives on how I hear it. It's endless exploration and inspiration.

01:07
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
My name is Tina Jøhnk Christensen, and I'm the host of Danish Originals, a podcast series created in partnership with the American Friends of the National Gallery of Denmark and the National Gallery of Denmark. Our goal is to celebrate Danish creatives who have made a significant mark in the US.

01:26
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Today, our guest is Nikolaj Hess, a Danish musician. Welcome, Nikolaj.

01:31
Nikolaj Hess
Thank you very much. I'm happy to be here.

01:34
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
It's very nice to have you here. We are in different parts of the world. Where are you now and would you mind describing where you are to the listeners?

01:44
Nikolaj Hess
Of course. I'm in Dumbo in New York, in Brooklyn. And I am at the water, in a tiny, relatively soundproof room that I borrowed here. There's padding on the wall, so the sound becomes nice and good. And there's a little dark wood. And I'm sitting on a relatively comfortable chair with my microphone in front of me. I'll try to stay at the same distance to it, so the sound will be relatively good.

02:19
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Thank you for being so thoughtful. You often work in New York and you have recorded your music there a lot. Why New York? What is the main reason for recording there?

02:31
Nikolaj Hess
I guess it goes back to — it goes all the way back, but I won't go all the way back for now. I was always super inspired by the American jazz sound and also the global melting pot that New York had to offer. So when I finished conservatory, I did a study trip where I was half a year in West Africa and then half a year in New York, combining all my interests for African folklore, drumming especially, and then American jazz.

03:06
Nikolaj Hess
And then when I got here, I was just like, okay, I have to, as many people experience when they get here, oh, I have to be here, I have to be here more. I actually managed to come back and come back and come back, and I've lived here on and off and go back and forth from Copenhagen a lot. So I've created a network of amazing colleagues that I really enjoy collaborating with.

03:30
Nikolaj Hess
So it's natural to make recordings, albums, projects that involve them both here and in Denmark and Europe. I was just in Amsterdam playing with my good friend and colleague, saxophone player Marc Mommaas. We have been playing since the late '90s, both here and in Europe, and also currently at the Copenhagen Jazz Festival where I invite him over every year.

03:57
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Nice. What was your first experience of New York like, apart from the jazz and the musicians that are obviously a big thing for you? What was it about the city that made you return again and again?

04:10
Nikolaj Hess
I mean, it is not apart from the jazz and the music scene, because that's such a huge influence on music in general. I do think that New York's a jazz capital. It's also the capital of the world, of course. It's clichés, but it still feels true to me. There's that extremely global perspective that you find here. I'm gonna go to cliché after cliché, but they tend to be true, some of them, that it's a window towards the whole world.

04:38
Nikolaj Hess
And I definitely feel that. Everybody meets here, almost everybody. Everybody comes here in some way or another, maybe to live here for a moment or to visit or to do a project. Somebody said that Brazil was the lungs of the world. So New York is maybe the brain of the world, where all the body parts have signals to New York. All countries have some relationship to this city.

05:01
Nikolaj Hess
So that fascinates me. And also then just the level of thinking, the level of culture, the level of art, and for me, the level of jazz music. It's quality but it's also quantity. There's so much and there's such a richness in the variety of, in my case, music. You can really find specialists that are niche, niche, niche, niche, niche, which I find extremely inspiring.

05:33
Nikolaj Hess
And it informs my way of making music and thinking about creativity a lot. And then also, I don't know if it's just me, but it feels like other domains are easy to communicate with here. I definitely embrace that here, how thoughts from other artistic domains, but also just all other domains, they make me reflect into how I think about the music I make. Maybe I should take that concept and see what can I do with that.

06:03
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
I'm not super knowledgeable in this field, but I always thought New Orleans would be the place to be for jazz musicians.

06:12
Nikolaj Hess
I've been once and that was amazing also. New Orleans is definitely an important place for music and has an incredible tradition. New York is —

06:22
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
It's bigger also.

06:23
Nikolaj Hess
Yeah, yeah. Bigger. The first evening I arrived, I went to stay in the East Village at St. Mark's Place. And I came to the apartment. A friend of mine was living there, so I was a guest. I took a walk around the block after having installed myself, and met somebody that I met in Ærø.

06:50
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
That's a very small place in Denmark.

06:52
Nikolaj Hess
I had walked maybe two minutes, then I ran into somebody from Ærø that I'd met maybe five years earlier. And I think that's so classic, that you tend to meet people that you wouldn't think you would meet there, except that you do meet them there. I don't meet them in Copenhagen, or in Berlin, or maybe Berlin has a bit of the same feature. And I've experienced that many times.

07:19
Nikolaj Hess
Okay, coming off the plane and maybe going to Grand Central Station and then walking two blocks, and then looking in a Starbucks and seeing an old friend that I haven't seen for 15 years. Oh my God. Are you here? Yes, I'm here.

07:35
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Everybody goes to New York.

07:36
Nikolaj Hess
Everybody goes there, or here.

07:40
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Talking about meeting, when I met you, you were performing at the Getty Museum here in Los Angeles at an event for the Beyond the Light exhibition. You played pieces inspired by art that were shown on the wall behind you. How did they inspire you to write the music that you wrote?

08:00
Nikolaj Hess
The exhibition was at the Met and the Getty. The take on it was not the classic Danish Golden Age painting. It was an outside perspective, which is also what I think New York and in this case, LA, can offer, a different perspective that had a lot about identity and cross-pollination between arts and science, which I am super interested in.

08:29
Nikolaj Hess
The Rhythmic Conservatory in Copenhagen and the Cultural Ministry have grants for large scale artistic research, and I did one called Transformative Reflections where I made a method translating from one artistic domain to another. And in this case, from painting to jazz, but you could say, from visual art to music. And this concert that you heard was a result of that.

08:52
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Is that something that comes natural to you, that you hear sounds when you look at something visually inspiring?

09:01
Nikolaj Hess
Yes, I guess it does. I was curious about how could I develop a method, so what emerges when I look at a painting is not only the intuitive but be a little more methodical about it. I took inspiration from several paintings, but also the overall theme of the exhibition. The whole exhibition is so much about nature.

09:26
Nikolaj Hess
For example, for Limewood Tree by Købke, that's a sketch of a lime tree with no leaves on it. I was curious about how that's a similar look in the roots of this tree. I wanted to explore the personality — that tree had such a personality. I tried to find the mood. It had kind of a melancholy to it and also a beauty and a simplicity, like fine thin lines, but then there's the whole root net that you don't see.

10:01
Nikolaj Hess
I used the overtone row as tonal material, but also a mirroring of the overtone row, which is similar to what we in composition talk about as negative harmony, which would be the root net. So if you have a series of intervals going upwards, you have a mirror of that going downwards.

10:25
Nikolaj Hess
There was the world of the tree, but then also the underworld of the roots. And then, switching from that as a mood with a mix of composed and improvised elements with tonal material that I felt reflected the personality of the tree. So that was one example.

10:44
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
So the inspiration is very specific.

10:47
Nikolaj Hess
Yeah, there are specific elements. In my research project, I worked with four different categories. One is called "Intuitive," where I try not to think too much about what the elements are. And then a second category I call "Element Analytical," which is a little more like this, where I choose some elements, and see how can I work with them in the music.

11:10
Nikolaj Hess
And then a third category, called "Concrete Systematic," which is very specific. Maybe I'll make a pixel analysis of the painting and translate that into MIDI information. The old-fashioned version of that is taking a piece of sheet music and placing it on top of the painting and then see, okay, these objects become notes in the sheet music.

11:39
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Now it sounds very scientific.

11:41
Nikolaj Hess
It's very systematic to try to get some results that land outside what I would just do anyway. And then the fourth category is called "Idea Analytical," like we did with the exhibition. What are the currents in society at the moment and what is maybe the philosophy of the artist that is behind the work? You don't see it, but maybe you experience it somehow anyway, or don't experience it, but it's part of that time or that artist's life.

12:13
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
And now it sounds very intellectual too.

12:15
Nikolaj Hess
The idea is to make it both emotional and also something where there's concepts and systems. So it's translating and drawing out inspiration from pacing, from all kinds of possible angles.

12:35
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
It's complicated and there's a lot of different methods to it. Thank you for explaining.

12:41
Nikolaj Hess
Yes. The method I created is definitely not just one method, it's a collection of different perspectives, different angles, you could also say.

12:53
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
You've been to Nigeria, you mentioned West Africa before, South Africa, with your music, many other places. How did you end up in West Africa? What made you travel to several countries there and explore what they have to offer musically?

13:15
Nikolaj Hess
From early on, I was interested in especially West African music, and I wanted to go deeper into that inspiration and learn more about it and that whole perspective of playing music and how it's connected with society and the rest of the culture, and of music that I create, how can I develop it and how does it relate to everything else.

13:40
Nikolaj Hess
I studied at the University of Ghana in Legon and I studied with local drum groups. And then I also went to Nigeria and was there for one and a half months. And also got to play a lot of really amazing music with Afrobeat musician Fela Kuti, who I got a chance to talk to, and his son Femi Kuti also, and his band. So that was quite an experience.

14:10
Nikolaj Hess
That's another New York thing. Two days ago, I was at the Blue Note and I heard Seun Kuti, who's Fela's youngest son. His band was playing at the Blue Note. I was invited there. I met Seun afterwards and said, oh, we met in Lagos back in the '90s. And oh, he was like, I was only ten years old. It was another fun New York moment. I hadn't seen him since, but I remembered him as a kid.

14:40
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
What does it mean to you that you are a Danish musician who plays on the world stage?

14:47
Nikolaj Hess
Some of my roots are very, very much Danish music, Danish folk music, Danish folklore music, and Scandinavian music in general. But then also I really enjoy all the global inspirations and definitely inspirations from American jazz specifically. The first time somebody called me an international Dane, I felt okay, that's a nice compliment and a nice label.

15:21
Nikolaj Hess
I can feel very at home in that, because as much as the American jazz and the global music is a big part of what I do, I also feel that my perspective, or maybe my fingerprint, is that I'm mixed with my roots of growing up next to the Danish forest and next to the Danish fjord. And how that has shaped me a lot.

15:49
Nikolaj Hess
So Danish nature is there somewhere in what I do. But also then all the international perspectives and learning so much about the whole world, but also about where I come from by traveling to other places and meeting other cultures.

16:10
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
You've also played at the Kennedy Center, and you will play there again. This is a very renowned institution in Washington, DC. Is the Kennedy Center a special place to perform?

16:22
Nikolaj Hess
It is definitely a special place to perform and it's an honor to go there and I'm really looking forward to this concert, which is part of their festival at the moment called Earth to Space. I'll actually apply some of the principles from my translating from one domain to another to this concert as well, look at what kind of methods might be applicable to the whole concept of space, and earth to space, and how will that manifest in the music. So that's exciting.

16:55
Nikolaj Hess
Last year, I was at the Smithsonian at the Hirshhorn collection to do a concert there, also incorporating some of this work I've done with paintings and music. And I was invited to an artist talk with the title "Where Do We Belong?" about how do we belong in these times, which of course, is interesting for anybody involved with culture and art.

17:18
Nikolaj Hess
And the moderator was the curator at the Kennedy Center then. She invited me to come because we talked a little about this project, and I have a band called Spacelab. So she found that also, okay, that might fit into our Earth to Space program.

17:36
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
You're so prolific. What are you the most proud of? What are the moments that stand out for you in your career?

17:44
Nikolaj Hess
One recent highlight was releasing a violin concerto that I was commissioned to write. I played violin as a kid. I don't really play it anymore, but I love to write for it. So it was such a treat to be invited to make a violin concerto for solo violin and a string orchestra. Such a beautiful sound that can create.

18:06
Nikolaj Hess
Maybe it goes without saying, the collaborations with AFSMK have been totally amazing, from back when we did impressions of Hammershøi, which was one of the first collaborations we did, those concerts inspired by paintings. And then the Red Studio collaboration with MoMA, and then the Met that was also incredible.

18:31
Nikolaj Hess
I have to mention playing with Fela Kuti in Lagos in Nigeria, that was mind blowing. And the first trio concert I did in New York City with that version of the Nikolaj Hess New York trio. That was quite a blast for me, because I had been dreaming of playing my own concert in New York at Sweet Basil, which was a great club that has closed now. And also playing at Jazz at Lincoln, at Dizzy's Club Coca-Cola. A lot of places in New York have been highlights for me.

19:08
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
I'm a film lover, so I am excited about your film scoring. You did a score for Lars von Trier's Melancholia. Talk about the process of making a score with somebody like Lars von Trier.

19:22
Nikolaj Hess
Okay. Yes. Yeah. No, yeah, no, I mean, I just mentioned a little fragment of highlights, so everything I didn't mention is standing there — and what about us and what about this? But okay. Yeah. Making music for film is something I really love to do, and it's different than playing a concert, obviously, and making a jazz album. But it's also similar in many ways. And I must say, working with Lars von Trier, that was super exciting for me. Let me think for a moment here what I'm going to say about it —

20:06
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Ha! I don't know — I'm not sure if this is a good thing or a bad thing!

20:11
Nikolaj Hess
Exactly! Okay. Another highlight was actually collaborating with and making music for Lars von Trier's Melancholia. Also being in the movie — I'm in the movie as a wedding band. That was really incredible to see how such an amazing artist like Lars von Trier worked. I didn't know about his processes beforehand, so I was kind of surprised by how improvised he was. It reminded me of playing jazz, in a way. Maybe I see jazz everywhere because I love it.

20:50
Nikolaj Hess
But the actors had a lot of freedom and they were also semi-improvising. And I'm not sure how Lars von Trier does it. It felt to me he knows when he has what he needs, and then he'll move on with that. It's such a high level of artistry that's around him. He managed to assemble that and cast that. For me, it also feels there's an incredible sensitivity to how the world is in his works that I really admire.

21:24
Nikolaj Hess
When working with him, he would be like, oh, I don't know a thing about music, in a very humble way. And then he would say something extremely precise about what sounded right for the movie. So, understated in a cool way.

21:37
Nikolaj Hess
When we did Melancholia, Anders Refn, another great Danish director, he was co-directing. He has made two movies, Out of the Darkness and Into the Darkness. And now the third installment in this trilogy, I'm gonna score that too. And also as I was in the previous ones, I'm gonna be in the movie as a band or as a musician. That has become a little thing that I perform as a musician in movies.

22:09
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
That sounds like fun. Let's go back in time now. You were born in Vejle, in Jutland, Denmark.

22:17
Nikolaj Hess
No!

22:19
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
No? You weren't?

22:20
Nikolaj Hess
No!

22:21
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Where were you born then? I'm sorry.

22:24
Nikolaj Hess
It doesn't matter. I was born in Frederiksberg —

22:27
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Oh!

22:29
Nikolaj Hess
And then I grew up in Vejle.

22:33
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Oh, okay.

22:35
Nikolaj Hess
Outside Vejle, very close to the forest and the fjord, as I mentioned earlier. Yeah.

22:40
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Okay, so you did grow up in Vejle. What was your upbringing like?

22:46
Nikolaj Hess
Wow. What was my upbringing like?

22:48
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
You had a piano in the house…

22:50
Nikolaj Hess
Yeah, there was something about the piano that always attracted me and I could find the melodies on it. My mom, she showed me some Scandinavian folk music that I picked up, and my dad, he showed me something that was a little more jazz-like that I picked up. So that's still two important tracks, two influences of music, that I've developed the interest for along with many other things, of course.

23:17
Nikolaj Hess
And I think, I said this earlier also, growing up close to nature has also shaped how I experienced things and how — I cannot say specifically how, but somehow, how the music I make sounds.

23:33
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
You grew up in the 1970s. Even though you've done so many things, you are only 57. So you're not that old. It sounds like you've lived forever with all the stuff you've done.

23:44
Nikolaj Hess
I tend to have a lot of projects going on and I thrive doing that.

23:52
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
What were your musical inspirations back then when you were a child and growing up as a teenager, maybe also?

24:01
Nikolaj Hess
Some of the first music I really was fascinated by and would want to hear again and again as a four-year-old, was Mozart. I loved that. And then I heard an album with Miles Davis, and I was sold to that sound of jazz. It is a certain sound and a certain feel and a specific type of presence that I experienced in that music.

24:31
Nikolaj Hess
And Bill Evans, a piano player, I was amazed by how his touch on the piano was. And many others since then. Those are some of the early influences. When I was a child, I would go to the library and get LPs, stacks of LPs, and listen to them, like really, really, really deep, deep listening, again and again, and check out things, analyze, and immerse myself in this. And a lot of jazz music.

25:00
Nikolaj Hess
Also, there was this teacher in school who was a good jazz piano player, Karl-Åge. He's actually the dad of a bass player I play a lot with, Anders Christensen. And he had a great thick jazz feel on the piano. And I asked him, oh, can you give me some jazz piano lessons? And he was like, ah, you just listen and figure it out.

25:23
Nikolaj Hess
And that was frustrating at the moment because I wanted him to show me how to do it. But in the long run, I think it was great advice because that whole listening thing is super important for me in music — how to listen and how to play as a result of listening, how to create music as a result of listening. That might be obvious, but I think it's important.

25:46
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
You have two brothers who are also musicians, Emil and Mikkel. How did it inspire you that you were all musical?

25:55
Nikolaj Hess
That's a great thing to share for us — was, and is. And also both my parents, they were good amateur musicians and very interested in music and the arts. And that was a lot of space to do music in our home. It wasn't like, oh, please don't play. We were never forced to play, but there was a lot of encouragement and support for it. I think that meant a lot.

26:21
Nikolaj Hess
So both my brothers, they have also been in New York and studied and lived here. And we've done things here. I've done a lot with the Hess is More band also, of course, and we have the 3 x Hess band. And it's really a special way of communicating with somebody you were already close with, I think. It's a gift, it's really a gift to have that together.

26:49
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
I'm from a musical family too. My dad was a bass player at a club in Odense called Riverside.

26:56
Nikolaj Hess
Oh!

26:57
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
And both my uncles played the bass because my grandfather played the bass. And my dad played with Lionel Hampton.

27:03
Nikolaj Hess
Oh wow. That's something.

27:07
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Yeah, so they were cool.

27:08
Nikolaj Hess
Very cool.

27:09
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Yeah. So I know the three brothers loved sharing that musical experience. Would you describe for us what it was that made your ears especially alert to that genre of music?

27:19
Nikolaj Hess
I was taking piano lessons from an early age, which was a mix of classical and then some other things, but a little more to the classical side, for sure. But then there was, as I said, hearing Miles Davis and thinking, I wanna be closer to that. The aspect of improvising was so interesting and fun, and felt like such an exploration in how to do that and how to create music yourself. It was very natural to move into the jazz field.

27:55
Nikolaj Hess
I guess it's natural for all of us to make up things and then it was also just exciting that it was part of the tradition of the music as it isn't just where you figure it out. But I like to study also, many, many aspects of music. I love the mix of being completely intuitive and making something up from scratch and not thinking about how it should or shouldn't be, but just going with some kind of flow, and then analyzing and learning more about the structures and principles of it.

28:35
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
You talk about studying. You have a degree from the Rhythmic Conservatory in Denmark. What kind of foundation did that give you?

28:43
Nikolaj Hess
It wasn't a full jazz degree, but it was very jazz-oriented. I had some amazing American jazz pianists as teachers there. Butch Lacy was a great inspiration and Horace Parlan and then also a bunch of Danish jazz musicians taught there. Butch Lacy was also a great composer and music philosopher. My foundation there was a mix of jazz piano, classical piano, ear training theory, arranging, composing, and a deep and slightly broad foundation in jazz and in music in general.

29:30
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
What would you say, apart from your formal education at this school, has been the most important lessons for you? What were the experiences that made you grow the most as a musician?

29:41
Nikolaj Hess
I definitely learned a lot from my self-made study year, which was Africa and New York. So, extended studies. Learning about rhythmic perception and sensitivity by studying music in Africa, I think was something that influenced me a lot also in the music I made after that and but also was interested in before that.

30:07
Nikolaj Hess
Playing with amazing musicians and growing with collaborations that have been going on for a long time has also been something that's really meant a lot for what I do, I think, and affected what I do a lot. And then — really, the deep questions!

30:25
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Sorry!

30:26
Nikolaj Hess
No, it's good. Okay. The artistic research project was a big project to do. It is, in a way, on a high academic level, it's practice-based artistic research, but it was a nice way of using my brain in a different way. I learned a lot from that, which also affects how I think about music.

30:50
Nikolaj Hess
Moving to New York was such an experience and I feel expanded my perspective and made me grow a lot. Also in the sense like, okay, I came here and I went out and heard somebody who I thought was an amazing jazz piano player and it was like, okay, wow, that's sounding so great, I wanna learn everything from that.

31:17
Nikolaj Hess
And then the next day, hearing somebody else who sounded completely different, and having the same wow, okay, this is incredible, I really have to pick up everything this person does. And the third day, yet a third person. Wow, okay. Because the level is so high and it's in so many different directions.

31:33
Nikolaj Hess
And then when that goes on for long enough, I felt there was a combination of, okay, I really want to be on the highest possible level and keep growing. I think I always wanted to keep growing, but this accelerated maybe that wish. And then also re-realizing I have to be myself, I cannot try to sound like this person or this person.

31:57
Nikolaj Hess
They already do that, and they do that so incredibly well. And I knew that. But that was also in the window-to-the-whole-world perspective, okay, yes, I gotta be the best version of myself, however we work on getting there. And the focus on originality, maybe that's also just reaffirming something that I was doing already.

32:25
Nikolaj Hess
Coming here, I almost knew nobody, so I really had to embrace and also develop my extroverted side and my capacity and skills to be like, hello, I'm Nikolaj, I'm a piano player and composer from Denmark and it would be nice to do something and let's try to work together.

32:44
Nikolaj Hess
And that, in the beginning, could be a struggle, to start from scratch or to start from scratch like that, and nothing to fall back on. But then after a while, and that was quite a while, it felt like quite a while, then things started coming back to me and I felt that, okay, wow, I've managed to build a network and of course, with help from friends, felt like quite an accomplishment for me.

33:08
Nikolaj Hess
Then suddenly, having that strength of feeling, okay, something has grown here that wasn't already there. And that's really something. And I think that's maybe also a typical New York experience. And so it's not just coming and then everything is a success. But there's a lot of hard work put into it, or there's some struggle put into it. And then it's just amazing that it actually works out.

33:33
Nikolaj Hess
And some of the dreams — I had a dream to be able to be in both Copenhagen and New York and have a network of colleagues, amazing colleagues, in both places. And then suddenly I was like, wow, this is something I really dreamt of having. And now it's like this. That was mind blowing for me, at least.

33:53
Nikolaj Hess
Then also as a result of that network created, then some of these people, they are now back in the original countries or other places. So now I have friends all over the world that I'll sometimes collaborate with in places I might not otherwise go. So it is really that window to the world for me.

34:16
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
An international community.

34:19
Nikolaj Hess
Yeah. International community.

34:21
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Jazz community or music community —

34:24
Nikolaj Hess
Music and arts community. Yeah. Yeah, I wanted to share that.

34:30
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Thank you. And my final question to you, if even though we could go on forever.

34:36
Nikolaj Hess
We could totally go on forever.

34:38
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
What do you want to achieve still? What is on your bucket list?

34:42
Nikolaj Hess
Oh my God!

34:44
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
We are talking about the future now. We are going through it all: past, present, future.

34:48
Nikolaj Hess
Yes. Oh, what do I want to achieve? I think it's the same as always. I want to develop how I create music. I think that's always been my goal, to get better at it, get deeper into it, get closer to it, understand more about it.

35:07
Nikolaj Hess
How I relate to music is also very much how do I belong to it, or what are my roots and how are my roots now, and where am I placed in the world, and where are we all placed in the world, and how are we all connected? And how does that affect everything, and how do we communicate?

35:30
Nikolaj Hess
I think it's more that than specific projects or specific things. But of course with that, hopefully, and that has been the case in the past and present, also comes exciting specific projects. Yeah, it's more like continuing being in and learning more and being connected to music and the arts and the world of that.

35:59
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
On that note, on that beautiful note, thank you so much, Nikolaj, for being part of Danish Originals. We really appreciate you being with us.

36:07
Nikolaj Hess
Oh you are very welcome. Thanks for the invitation and yeah, what a pleasure.

36:17
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
For today's episode, Nikolaj Hess chose Matisse: The Red Studio exhibition held at the National Gallery of Denmark and the Museum of Modern Art in New York.