Grave Thoughts

It being a lovely day in Copenhagen yesterday I decided to go for a long walk. My destination was the famous Assistens Kirkegård which is in the Nørrebro district of the city. You might think that was a rather morbid choice of place to go for a stroll in the sunshine, but actually it’s not that way at all. It’s actually a rather beautiful place, a very large green space criss-crossed by tree-lined paths. We British have a much more reserved attitude to cemeteries than the Danes seem to have, at least judging by yesterday; joggers and cyclists pass through Assistens Cemetery at regular intervals, and many people were having picnics or just sunbathing between the gravestones.  And of course there were many tourists wandering around, myself included. I found this matter-of-fact attitude to the dead rather refreshing, actually.

Incidentally, I was also surprised to see a number of Jewish burials among the Christian ones. I don’t know if this happens in British graveyards.

Part of the attraction of Assistens Kirkegård – the name derives from the fact that it was originally an auxiliary burial place, outside the main city, designed to take some of the pressure off the smaller cemeteries in the inner areas – is the large number of famous people buried there.  The cemetery is extremely large (about 25 hectares), and the maps don’t show the locations of all the famous people laid to rest there, but I did find quite a few.

Here for example is the memorial to one of the most famous Danes of all, Hans Christian Andersen

Going by the number of signposts pointing to it, this must be one of the most popular sites for visitors to the cemetery, along with the grave of the philosopher Søren Kierkegaard. One can also quite easily locate the memorial which marks the last resting place of Niels Bohr and various other members of his family:

But it’s not only Danes that are buried here. There’s a corner of one plot occupied by a number of famous American Jazz musicians, including pianist Kenny Drew and, most famously of all, tenor saxophonist Ben Webster whose gravestone is rather small, but clearly very well tended, no doubt by a Danish jazz lover:

Unfortunately, I was unable to locate one of the graves I wanted to find, that of the great Heldentenor Lauritz Melchior. I was surprised to find his name was absent from the main index. I know he was cremated and his ashes buried there, and I even found a picture of his memorial on the net, but the cemetery is so large that without further clues I couldn’t find it. I’ll have to go back on a subsequent visit after doing a bit more research.

It’s very interesting that some of the smaller graves are extremely well-tended whereas many of the more opulent memorials are in a state of disrepair. My ambition is to be forgotten as quickly as possible after my death so the idea of anyone erecting some grandiose marble monument on my behalf fills me with horror, but I have to say I do find graveyards are strangely comforting places. Rich and poor, clever and stupid, ugly and beautiful; death comes to us all in the end. At least it’s very democratic.

And after about three hours strolling around in the cool shade of the trees in Assistens Kirkegård the thought did cross my mind there still seems to be plenty of room…

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St Thomas

Walking past a Jazz club during my recent trip to Copenhagen – sadly, I didn’t have time to go in – I remembered the many times I’d heard the great Danish bass player Niels-Henning Ørsted Pedersen (known universally to Jazz fans as NHØP) playing there in the past. He died suddenly of a heart attack in 2005, at the age of 58, bringing to a close a career that had started when he was only 17. He was an incredible virtuoso, playing his unwieldy instrument in an astonishingly nimble fashion. As a result he was number one choice as accompanist whenever leading jazz artists toured his native Denmark where he remained most of his life, despite frequent invitations to join big name bands abroad. Although he appeared quite frequently on TV in the United Kingdom with Oscar Peterson in the 1970s, he never really became as widely known as he should have been given what a great musician he was.

I looked around on youtube to find an appropriate example of his playing, and found this superlative performance which I’d never seen before and which also offers a fine helping  of the great Sonny Rollins on tenor saxophone.  He will be 80 later this year and is still playing with the immense drive and imagination that he has shown since he began his career at the age of 11. He also wrote the tune, St Thomas, which has a strong caribbean feel to it, and which is based on a song from the Virgin Islands that his mother sang to him when he was a child. I’ve seen him play a number of times live, including at Ronnie Scott’s club in London and at the Royal Festival Hall, and wherever it was he always set the place on fire.

I hope the lilting calypso beat,  infectiously happy tune and, most of all, superb playing by every member of the band here will give you as warm a feeling as it did me when I first heard it. The other members of the quartet alongside Sonny Rollins are Kenny Drew on piano and Albert “Tootie” Heath on drums, but listen out for NHØP’s fantastic bass solo, starting around 4:41. Brilliant.