One of the pleasures of living in Copenhagen is that you can decide on a whim to stop by a neighbourhood bar and end up hearing world-class jazz.
That happened to me yesterday evening when I managed to catch the second set by Andreas Toftemark Quintet at Blågårds Apotek.
Andreas Toftemark is one of the most interesting voices on the younger Danish jazz scene. Based in Copenhagen, but shaped by studies in New York, Berlin, Paris and Copenhagen, he belongs to that generation of musicians who effortlessly bridge American hard bop traditions and contemporary European jazz.
I have become particularly fond of his latest album, Roadmap, released on April Records. The record, recorded together with American trumpeter Benny Benack III, has a wonderful sense of direction and momentum while remaining deeply melodic. The title track, which was also played last night, remains one of my favourites.
The quintet at Blågårds Apotek was not the same line-up as on the album, but the format was. Alongside Toftemark on saxophone were Rolf Thofte on trumpet, Rasmus Sørensen on piano, Matthias Petri on bass and Nikolaj Bangsgaard on drums. Most of the repertoire consisted of compositions by Toftemark, with contributions from Sørensen and Thofte as well.
Another highlight was their rendition of Roy Hargrove’s Top of My Head.
I have loved Roy Hargrove’s music for decades. He died far too young in 2018. I was fortunate enough to hear him live around 1994 when I lived in New York, and later again in Copenhagen at Pumpehuset.
Toftemark’s quintet delivered a fine version of the tune. Not quite the same as hearing Hargrove himself, of course.
And Andreas could perhaps have gone all the way and sung the closing lyrics as Hargrove did on the original recording.
Then again, perhaps some roads are best left to the memories.
06/07/2026 16:39:18
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- One of the pleasures of living in Copenhagen is that you can decide on a whim to stop by a neighbourhood bar and end up hearing world-class jazz.
That happened to me yesterday evening when I managed to catch the second set by Andreas Toftemark Quintet at Blågårds Apotek.
Andreas Toftemark is one of the most interesting voices on the younger Danish jazz scene. Based in Copenhagen, but shaped by studies in New York, Berlin, Paris and Copenhagen, he belongs to that generation of musicians who effortlessly bridge American hard bop traditions and contemporary European jazz.
I have become particularly fond of his latest album, Roadmap, released on April Records. The record, recorded together with American trumpeter Benny Benack III, has a wonderful sense of direction and momentum while remaining deeply melodic. The title track, which was also played last night, remains one of my favourites.
The quintet at Blågårds Apotek was not the same line-up as on the album, but the format was. Alongside Toftemark on saxophone were Rolf Thofte on trumpet, Rasmus Sørensen on piano, Matthias Petri on bass and Nikolaj Bangsgaard on drums. Most of the repertoire consisted of compositions by Toftemark, with contributions from Sørensen and Thofte as well.
Another highlight was their rendition of Roy Hargrove’s Top of My Head.
I have loved Roy Hargrove’s music for decades. He died far too young in 2018. I was fortunate enough to hear him live around 1994 when I lived in New York, and later again in Copenhagen at Pumpehuset.
Toftemark’s quintet delivered a fine version of the tune. Not quite the same as hearing Hargrove himself, of course.
And Andreas could perhaps have gone all the way and sung the closing lyrics as Hargrove did on the original recording.
Then again, perhaps some roads are best left to the memories. (06/07/2026 16:39:18)
- One of the pleasures of a good wine tasting is that it is never really about the wine alone.
Nobody remembers acidity levels or fermentation techniques. What we remember are stories, places, people, and conversations.
Yesterday’s tasting was hosted by Rosforth & Rosforth, who opened their doors for an afternoon dedicated to natural wines from across Europe. A special thanks to Alex from Rosforth & Rosforth, whose expert guidance took us through six very different wines without ever becoming dogmatic or pretentious.
We began in Germany with Brüder Dr. Becker’s lively Pet Nat Riesling. We continued through France with Sophie et Gautier Guillemot-Michel’s elegant Une Bulle, on to Spain with the textured and characterful Els Bassots, and a beautiful Champagne from Bonnet-Ponson.
The finale was reserved for Georgia.
First a wonderfully expressive Mtsvane from Kakheti, and then an amber-coloured Rkatsiteli made according to the ancient qvevri tradition. By this point, the tasting had become almost a discussion group. Everyone seemed to find something different in the wines.
The final wine produced perhaps the greatest consensus of the afternoon. Around the table, people independently arrived at remarkably similar associations. Green pesto was the dominant note. Once someone had said it, it became impossible not to taste it.
Georgia is often described as the birthplace of wine. Tasting these wines, it was easy to understand why the country’s winemaking traditions have survived for millennia.
Six wines. Three countries. Thousands of years of accumulated knowledge.
And afterwards I did what any responsible participant in an afternoon natural wine tasting should do.
I went home and took a nap. (06/06/2026 17:00:33)
- One of the pleasures of getting older is becoming a regular somewhere.
For me, one of those places is Hauser Vinbar. Not because it is fashionable or because the wine list is long, but because it has that increasingly rare quality: it feels like a place rather than a concept.
Yesterday’s summer wine tasting at Rosforth & Rosforth brought together staff, me as a regular, and a few family members, including Vilhelm and Tobias, on the harbour front.
About a year ago, Konstantin took over Hauser. Some wine enthusiast may know him from Autopol. Taking over a beloved place is always risky. The temptation is either to preserve everything unchanged or to reinvent it completely.
He has managed something more difficult: preserving the warmth, hospitality and slightly eccentric charm that made people return, while quietly transforming Hauser into one of Copenhagen’s most interesting natural wine bars.
Particularly fascinating is his focus on Georgian wines. Georgia is often described as the cradle of wine-making, with traditions stretching back thousands of years. Through Konstantin’s own family connections to the country, that history suddenly feels less like a chapter in a book and more like a conversation across a table.
The tasting moved from bottle to bottle, story to story. Some wines challenged expectations. Others reminded us why certain traditions survive for centuries.
Perhaps that is what good wine bars really do. They are not primarily about wine. They are places where strangers become acquaintances, acquaintances become friends, and where stories, ideas and cultures travel surprisingly well from one end of the table to the other. (06/06/2026 16:42:20)
- Yesterday was Constitution Day in Denmark.
For most Danes, 5 June is associated with the signing of the Danish Constitution in 1849 and the democratic traditions that followed. It is one of the few national days that still carries a certain civic weight.
It is also Father’s Day.
I have always had mixed feelings about Father’s Day. Like so many modern commemorative days, it often feels more like a marketing exercise than a genuine tradition—a reminder to consume rather than remember.
But 5 June has a very real meaning for me.
It is my father Jakob H. Grønbæk’s birthday.
My father died eight years ago at the age of 92. Yesterday, however, we celebrated what would have been his 100th birthday.
We gathered at the grave of my parents at Allerslev Church: my brother and me, our three sons, my cousin Jesper, our better halves, and a number of close friends.
Standing there, I was struck by how quickly a century can pass. A hundred years sounds impossibly long when viewed from one end, and remarkably brief when viewed from the other.
A birthday celebration at a graveyard may sound sombre. It was not.
It was filled with stories, laughter, memories, and the quiet recognition that a life continues to echo through children, grandchildren, relatives, friendships, and shared experiences.
Constitution Day is, in a sense, also about continuity between generations. Democracies survive because each generation receives something from those who came before and passes it on again.
The same is true of families.
Yesterday we celebrated both. (06/06/2026 16:26:22)
- This time of year in Copenhagen means one thing: Distortion.
I have had the privilege of following the festival from unusually close quarters for more than a decade. For the past ten years, I have served on the board of the Distortion Foundation. This year, I stepped down to make room for new forces and new perspectives. Fortunately, I still have the pleasure of remaining involved through the festival’s advisory board.
Distortion is one of those rare cultural institutions that feels impossible and inevitable at the same time. Impossible because no sensible person would design a festival that attempts to transform an entire city into a temporary laboratory for music, art, urban life, and organized unpredictability. Inevitable because once you have experienced it, Copenhagen without Distortion becomes difficult to imagine.
Much of the credit belongs to Thomas Fleurquin, whose energy and persistence have carried the project through more than two decades of growth, experimentation, crises, and reinvention. It was a pleasure to catch up with him again at this year’s opening.
The 2026 Opening Ceremony at Kongens Nytorv once again demonstrated why Distortion remains unique. This year’s concept, Live Mixtape, brought together artists performing simultaneously across multiple stages, creating a single continuous performance assembled in real time. A kind of urban composition where post-club music, choirs, percussion ensembles, electronic sounds, and pop collided and merged.
Distortion has long described this approach as “Orchestrated Chaos”—a phrase first coined around earlier iterations of the concept. It remains one of the best descriptions I know of both the festival and, perhaps, contemporary city life itself.
The remarkable thing is that what could easily descend into confusion instead becomes something larger than the sum of its parts. Thousands of people gathered in the middle of the city, not merely consuming culture but becoming part of it.
For a brief moment, Kongens Nytorv felt less like a square and more like a living instrument.
And every year I leave wondering the same thing: how can they possibly top this next year? (06/06/2026 16:14:50)
- A lovely start to a summer Saturday in Copenhagen.
Together with good friends, I joined “GÅ’lovsdag” — a free 50 km walk from Kongens Nytorv to Kulturværftet in Helsingør, organised by En GÅtur langs kysten.
The idea is simple and generous: everyone can join, everyone walks at their own pace, and you decide yourself how far your legs and feet are willing to negotiate.
I managed the first 10 km from Kongens Nytorv to Hellerup. The others continued another 40 km to Helsingør. I had a more bourgeois excuse: I had to get home for a wine tasting.
Still, there is something wonderful about seeing perhaps a thousand people gather early in the morning simply to walk along the coast together.
A city becomes different when experienced at walking speed. (06/06/2026 15:57:41)
- Sometimes an exhibition reminds you as much of what an artist does best as of what they are trying to do now.
Last Friday, I visited Moonwalk, Tal R’s new exhibition at Gl. Holtegaard, which has finally reopened after a major renovation.
The reopening itself is wonderful news. Gl. Holtegaard remains one of Denmark’s most beautiful exhibition spaces, and it was a pleasure to see the old buildings filled with art and people again.
Tal R is one of the defining Danish artists of his generation. His colourful, playful and deeply personal visual language is instantly recognisable.
This exhibition focuses primarily on sculpture and three-dimensional works. There are bronze figures, assembled objects, ceramics, papier-mâché constructions and all manner of strange creatures inhabiting the rooms.
Yet I have to admit that this was not one of my favourite exhibitions of the spring.
A recent review argued that the exhibition misses the presence of Tal R’s paintings and drawings, and I found myself recognising some of that criticism. The sculptures often felt like fragments of a larger universe whose centre of gravity was elsewhere.
Ironically, my favourite works were the paintings displayed in the side building.
Standing before them, I was reminded why Tal R’s work has had such a lasting impact. The paintings seemed to contain all the humour, mystery, colour and narrative richness that first made me fall in love with his art.
Still, seeing Gl. Holtegaard alive again is reason enough to make the trip. (06/05/2026 20:45:54)
- Last night week and I went to see DSCH, the remarkable theatre concert by the Norwegian Chamber Orchestra at the Royal Danish Theatre.
The title refers to Shostakovich’s musical signature: D–E♭–C–B in German notation (DSCH), a motif that became both a personal trademark and, in many ways, a coded assertion of individuality within the Soviet system.
Few composers fascinate me as much as Dmitri Shostakovich. Not only because of the music itself, but because of the role he occupied: celebrated artist, suspected dissident, loyal Soviet citizen, reluctant propagandist, survivor. His life remains one of the twentieth century’s great studies in the complicated relationship between art and power.
The concept behind DSCH is deceptively simple. The musicians do not merely perform Shostakovich’s music. They inhabit it. Playing from memory, moving across the stage, masked, choreographed, and immersed in a visual universe that is at times playful, unsettling, absurd, and deeply moving, the orchestra transforms the concert into something between theatre, dance, and ritual. The result is less a biography than a portrait of a state of mind.
The Norwegian Chamber Orchestra played Shostakovich’s greatest hits with extraordinary precision and energy. Yet my personal highlight came at the very end: the Chamber Symphony in C Minor, Op. 110a.
Originally arranged by Rudolf Barshai from Shostakovich’s Eighth String Quartet, the work is often understood as one of the composer’s most personal statements. It is saturated with quotations from his own music and built around the DSCH motif itself. Listening to it after ninety minutes of musical fragments felt almost like watching a life flash before one’s eyes. Themes, memories, anxieties, triumphs and defeats returned one final time, gathered into a single work of devastating intensity.
Some hear the piece as a memorial to the victims of war. Others as a musical self-portrait. Perhaps it is both. What is certain is that it demonstrates something Shostakovich understood better than most composers: that a few recurring notes can contain an entire life. (06/05/2026 20:18:47)
- Some books are difficult because they are complex. Others are difficult because they insist on returning, again and again, to the same insight from different angles.
Martin Buber’s I and Thou (Jeg og Du in this Danish edition) belongs firmly in the second category.
The book revolves around what Buber calls two “primary words” or word-pairs: I–Thou and I–It.
When we say I–It, we encounter the world as objects. We observe, analyse, classify, measure, compare, and use. Science, administration, commerce, and much of everyday life depend on this mode of engagement.
When we say I–Thou, something different happens. The other is no longer an object but a presence. A person is not reduced to a collection of characteristics, functions, or utilities. We meet them as a whole. For Buber, the same possibility extends beyond human beings: to nature, art, and ultimately to God, whom he describes as the “Eternal Thou”.
It is an inspiring vision. It is also, at least for ordinary mortals, a rather demanding one.
A life lived entirely in the mode of I–Thou seems less like a practical possibility than a spiritual ideal. Most of us spend most of our days navigating a world of I–It relations. We answer emails, review contracts, buy groceries, board trains, and attend meetings. The world simply could not function otherwise.
To Buber’s credit, he appears to recognise this in the later parts of the book. The world of I–It is not evil or false. It is necessary. The problem arises only when it becomes the whole of reality. The task is therefore not to abolish I–It, but to ensure that it does not crowd out those rarer moments in which we genuinely encounter another person—or perhaps the world itself—as a Thou.
That strikes me as a valuable insight.
My reservation is literary rather than philosophical. I confess that I felt I had grasped Buber’s central point fairly early on. What follows often reads less like a sustained argument and more like a series of variations on a theme. The repetition is undoubtedly intentional, almost liturgical in character, but I found it at times more wearing than illuminating.
Still, nearly a century after its publication, I and Thou remains one of the classic attempts to remind us that human life cannot be reduced to information, utility, and function.
The question it leaves behind is a good one:
How much of our lives are spent saying “I–It”, and how often do we truly say “I–Thou”? (06/05/2026 19:59:00)
- I have fallen down the Walter Benjamin rabbit hole. I now see him everywhere: in stray references to critical theory, in debates over technology and mass culture, and in almost any serious attempt to think the twentieth and twenty‑first centuries philosophically.
I have read a number of his shorter works, but I have to admit that Benjamin is hard to read on his own terms. Too often I find myself retreating to secondary literature—especially Wolfram Eilenberger’s books on modern philosophy, and most recently Peter E. Gordon’s short but very insightful *The Pearl Diver*.
Gordon’s book does not try to domesticate Benjamin or smooth away the difficulty. Instead, it offers a kind of guided descent: it shows how Benjamin’s thought holds together without pretending that it ever fully settles.
To me, among many others, two strands in particular stand out: Benjamin’s idea that “criticism is nothing but the artwork’s self‑realisation,” and the emblematic role of Paul Klee’s *Angelus Novus* for his philosophy of history.
Benjamin’s claim that criticism is the artwork’s self‑realisation cuts against the familiar opposition between “creative” work and “mere” commentary. For Benjamin, a serious critical reading does not stand outside the work, judging it from some neutral vantage point; it is an immanent unfolding of the work’s own inner possibilities. Criticism, at its best, is the work thinking itself further.
Gordon traces this back to Benjamin’s early reflections on Romanticism and to his lifelong suspicion of biographical or psychological approaches that reduce the artwork to the author’s life. The task is not to explain the work away, but to let it speak more fully—to bring out the constellation of meanings that are already latent in it.
This has important consequences for how we understand Benjamin’s own essays and fragments. They are not secondary to literature, theology, or philosophy; they are experiments in making works—and, in a sense, history itself—realise themselves.
Gordon is particularly good at showing how Benjamin’s often aphoristic style is not an affectation but a method: each miniature, each citation, is a way of forcing a text or an image to disclose another layer of significance.
The same logic of “self‑realisation through criticism” is at work in Benjamin’s engagement with Paul Klee’s *Angelus Novus*, the painting that became the most famous visual cipher of his thought.
In Benjamin’s hands, Klee’s enigmatic angel becomes the “angel of history”: blown irresistibly into the future with his face turned toward the past, where he sees not a chain of events but one single catastrophe piling wreckage upon wreckage. We call this catastrophe “progress.”
Here too, criticism is not external description. Benjamin’s reading of *Angelus Novus* realises a possibility in the painting that is not simply “there” for any viewer to see, but that also does not feel arbitrary once it has been articulated.
Gordon shows how this image condenses Benjamin’s idiosyncratic Marxism, his theology of messianic interruption, and his acute sensitivity to the violence that underwrites modern “advances.” The angel becomes a figure through which history itself becomes legible to us differently. The commentary changes how we see both the painting and the century it silently contemplates.
What I found especially valuable in *The Pearl Diver* is how Gordon situates these motifs within Benjamin’s broader cultural criticism without flattening their strangeness. Benjamin appears not as a system‑builder but as a thinker for whom philosophy, literature, theology, and visual art constantly refract one another.
Gordon writes with a clarity that feels almost like an act of hospitality. For readers like me, who are drawn to Benjamin but repeatedly bounce off the density of the original texts, this book provides a way back in without turning Benjamin into something easy or familiar.
In the end, *The Pearl Diver* deepened my sense of why Benjamin continues to matter today. His vision of criticism as the artwork’s self‑realisation invites us to treat our own acts of reading, viewing, and thinking as serious interventions in the life of culture—not as footnotes to a finished canon.
And his meditation on *Angelus Novus* reminds us that any account of modernity worthy of the name must hold together catastrophe and hope, wreckage and the faint possibility of redemption.
Gordon manages to present these themes in a compact, highly readable form, making this book an excellent companion for anyone who, like me, has already fallen into the Benjamin rabbit hole and is still trying to find their way through its branching tunnels. (05/30/2026 18:48:50)