Nina Baun - Human (2016)

“Nina is a very talented and conscientious singer with a totally professional attitude to music making. Refreshingly, Nina views herself as more than just a soloist; her contribution is always for the greater good of the music…” says Django Bates, musician and composer, about Nina Baun’s music.

“What I’m doing is organic and in constant development, and I do not let my compositions be limited by fixed types of music. This record (“Something is always moving”, debut album released in DK in 2011 red.) is an offer of me, and just like people skip around between what is easy and what is hard, so do my music”, she says.

The tune Something is Moving, which will be on Nina Baun’s second album, was written in a rehearsal room in New York. It didn’t take her many hours, as it all came flowing to her. Nina rented the room, which is in an old stone house in Brooklyn, for a couple of hours, and on an old piano she composed one of the tunes, which she is most proud of today.

It is those kinds of moments that are significant to Nina Baun. Those moments are just as important as when she is on stage with Danish or international jazz musicians. It is the feeling of having a moment of pure and unrefined musicality, whether it’s bending over a grand piano in a rehearsal room in Brooklyn or on stage.

Nina Baun approaches her singing, compositions, and arrangements with great musical understanding and knowledge. It is not the role of figurehead that appeals to her. No, Nina is mainly a musician and a composer. And she’s been like that all through her career as performing artist and composer as well as student through four years in MGK at Sankt Annæ Gymnasium followed by five years in The Rhythmic Music Conservatory in Copenhagen, where in 2010 she earned her Master’s Degree in performing arts.

Many years before her time as a music student, Nina Baun made her first songs, when in the late 80’s she sat on the back of her father’s bike driving home from daycare.With her brother, Soren Baun, and her dad, who both are musicians as well, they wrote songs about what they saw and about things that meant something. Nina Baun sang about toys, candy, pets, and friends.

When Nina at the age of 11 began taking singing lessons, things started to speed up, and it was clear that she had an exceptional talent.

But it was especially when Nina Baun, at a four-year basic course in music (MGK), encountered a world that took music deadly seriously, that she realized she wanted to be a musician.

In the later years of the course, Nina Baun arrived at a feeling of being present in her own personal expression and sound. Next stop was the music conservatory, where five years shaped and challenged her.

Her own project, Nina Baun & GUMA, became a fundamentally creative source during the years at the music conservatory. With Jesper Thorn (bass),William Larsson (pia, Orpheus), Mads Emil Nielsen (dr, GRAF), Henrik Olsson (gui) and earlier Mathias Jørgensen (pia, Girls in airports) and Kevin Brow (dr, Canada) in the band, she had a place to convey the many impressions, ideas and new knowledge that the school offered her.

The band broke up in the spring of 2012. The time at the music conservatory was long gone and Nina Baun viewed the break-up as a natural result. Now she wanted to challenge herself in other constellations.

It is not only the schools that gave Nina Baun her training as a musician. It is on her journeys to New York and in her meetings with other artists that Nina Baun strikes the wild creativity and naturalness that characterize her music.

Age 28, Nina Baun is well on her way to establishing her name on the Danish jazz- and crossover scene. Even though she has played with many accomplished musicians in the business, such as Django Bates, Thomas Fonnesbaek, Jacob Christoffersen, and Jorgen Emborg, it is among other young, challenging, and promising artists she finds herself at home. ~by Sofie Tholl

Tracklist:

1. Wave Of Evergreen (4:39)
2. No Plans. Don't Ask (5:12)
3. Twisted (6:23)
4. Older Than I (4:27)
5. Cohabitant (4:49)
6. Implosive (4:31)
7. Stereo (4:41)
8. Tucked Away (3:49)
9. Life's Wiser (4:49)