Claes Brondal Makes a Scene of Jazz

The day after the successful Hamptons JazzFest summer launch party attracted several hundred guests at the Southampton Arts Center on June 22, Claes Brondal, executive director of the five-year, three-month annual festivity, takes a quick breather from all the heavy lifting of managing the free event and marvels at the fest’s phenomenal growth.

It’s part of the mission, Brondal says during a long conversation on the second floor of the Sag Harbor Library.

“As an organization, we think that people need performing arts in their lives,” he said. “Music is our tool, and we are creating a sense of community and human interaction. The musicians and the audience are separated by a stage, but we are interconnected. When the audience engages with the music, it’s like fairy dust where everything comes together and the whole of the experience takes off. Even if people don’t know the music, they can feel it so that it becomes a shared experience of appreciating live jazz music. That’s the mission.”

Early in the conversation, the 50-year-old Brondal opens his phone to proudly show a video of himself this winter with a full drum set playing on Kalakaua Street in Honolulu where he and his wife, Mare, own a 280 square-foot studio at Waikiki. They bought it in 2008 as an investment that has been used as a rental.

The past few years, the couple and their two sons have retreated there for a few months and worked remotely. At night, Brondal embraced his passion since starting to play drums when he was five years old in his native Copenhagen, Denmark, home. “I love playing in the streets,” he says. “It creates a vehicle for me to play. I constantly want to play, so I drummed for four to five hours and had a little can for donations — from $3 to $33 each night. But in reality, it’s an outgrowth of my creating other opportunities to start communities of musicians where I live, to doing jazz jams and now the festival itself. I believe in the greater good that what we do is for the good of mankind, but I just want to play like an 8-year-old kid.

While Brondal started drumming at a music school, he was fully fascinated by the notion of performing.

“At the age of 8 I saw this three-man traveling group called Cirkus Casablanca that would come into town in an old converted Della Terra camper and perform these tiny acts in the street,” he recalls. “It ignited me. I loved the romance. I loved how they were such outsiders and how they made people stop. It was very radical. They were attracting people with their crazy stunts. I knew then that I wanted to perform like that — to travel and tour.”

He attended a drum school at a youth center where he was mentored by a teacher, Tom Christensen, who taught him how to listen to the fragmentation of multilayered music. After that he took a private lesson with a teacher who gave him some bad advice.

“He told me that if I wanted to be a world-class player, I needed to practice 10 hours daily,” says Brondal. “I took it to heart so I practiced like a lunatic. That haunted me for many years.”

From there, he taught himself and sought out teachers, including jazz master Ed Thigpen who had moved from the U.S. to Copenhagen in 1972. When Brondal was 13, he introduced himself to the drummer and asked if he could meet him. He agreed.

“So I went to his studio with a lot of energy,” he says. “But I was nervous. He looked at me and said, ‘OK, give me your hand. You’re not going to sit down and play drums right away. You’re just going to walk around my studio slowly.’ He held my hand just to calm me down. And then the lesson started. Wow. And I remember he had just purchased a drone pedal that only heavy metal guys used. But he wanted to try that. I thought that was really cool. He was super kind.”

After Brondal graduated from school, he decided to apply to the Music Conservatory of Denmark. He was twice denied for being too young.

“I was exhausted, so I left my comfort zone and moved out of home when I was 17,” he says. “My rehearsal spaces were cellars and back alleys. It was always too loud. So I rode my bicycle and took public transit all around the city looking for a space. Finally I found a building in a back alley that had a second floor for rent above a makeshift car garage. I rented it and started inviting other groups to use it as a rehearsal space. It was affordable, but like years later with Hamptons JazzFest, I decided to make my The Nose Rehearsal Studio a nonprofit so I could get government grants and tax rebates.”

Brondal charged into marathon rehearsals when he was not doing bicycle messenger work and night performances. He did auditions for bands but was always told he was too good for the groups. He won a few talent shows and won a gold prize at one competition. He was approached by two young musicians who asked him to play with them on their renditions of jazz music by Dominican Republic pianist Michel Camilo. Brondal was doubtful because of their age, but they so impressed him that the three formed a trio that performed a full schedule of dates playing an expanded set list for the next three years.

“But we were always on the outside looking in,” he says. “We knew we had to redefine our own identities and invent our own careers.”

For Brondal, the next jump was to New York in 1993 where he tried to break into the fertile jazz environment at such underground clubs as Smalls. “Living in a big city if you’re young is very difficult,” he says. “You have to play in clubs and typically it’s really freaking late at night. I remember going to Smalls at 1 a.m. and coming out at 7 a.m.”

He stayed in New York until 1998 when he moved to Portland, Oregon, for two years. It was much cheaper. But again it meant starting from scratch to find a community where he could play his drums. Just as he was fitting in by making contacts with music colleagues and local music studios, in 2001 he got the offer he couldn’t refuse — moving to Sag Harbor to renovate Mare’s grandparents’ long-abandoned 200-year-old home.

“The family had purchased it in the post-war ’40s after World War II,” he says. “They figured if New York City was ever bombed, this would be a place to go. They bought the house for $5,000, and they just went there in the summer. But as they got older they couldn’t take care of it. When my wife’s grandparents were in their 90s, we moved in. There was no heat, windows were broken, faulty plumbing, lots of spiders. You can imagine a house that hadn’t been tended to since the ’50s. So it was almost like a time capsule.”

With carpentry skills inherited from his family, he started the massive renovation which continues today. As far as his playing, Brondal found a lack of opportunities.

“You did have art, you did have musicians, but there was no scene, especially with jazz and world music,” he says. “Jazz was seen as background music. My wife, who’s an artist, and I figured we had to create something, or we couldn’t stay there. You can find a place to live, but if you can’t practice your craft it’s terrifying. So we set out on a journey. Evolve or die.”

Brondal started by playing background music in restaurants with a few local musicians. “Extraordinarily boring,” he says. “That’s not what I set out to do. That’s not the end goal. But after a while, a few years later, in 2006, Bay Burger, a local burger joint, opened. And I was introduced to the owners. Joe Tremblay and his wife, Liza Tremblay, and her father, John Landes, and I suggested playing music there that was fun. I said let’s do a jam session. John asked what that was and I replied that a jam session is basically a community. It could be low key, but what the idea entailed was giving local musicians a place to play on a weekly basis with other local musicians.”

He made calls to the local high schools’ music teachers and band directors and asked them to tell their students who want to play this type of music to come. He imagined a mixer of local up-and-coming musicians who could play with the seasoned musicians who started to come by like Randy Brecker and his wife, Ada Rovatti, Morris Goldberg, Alex Sipiagin and Bill O’Connell.

“We developed quite a scene,” he says. “It started building slowly, doing the jam every week from 7 to 9 on Thursday nights. People started coming down. We had a house band and added special guests.”

While Bay Burger closed in 2018, the Jam Sessions continued. Brondal found substitute space at Page Sag Harbor, Southampton’s Union Cantina and East Hampton’s Paolo’s East (the latter two are no longer in business) until it found its present home as Jazz Night at the Masonic Temple in Sag Harbor on a biweekly basis on Friday nights.

“After a couple of years from when we started, in 2011, we incorporated The Jazz Sessions into a nonprofit organization, 501C3. We started doing all the things you have to do as an organization such as bookkeeping and taxes. Plus we now have the weekly Sunday night KLIW radio show that captures the jams. It all keeps rumbling along.”

Indeed, Brondal’s dream came true with the eventual development of the Hamptons JazzFest thanks to the support of Landes (as board director), jazz business/veteran agent Joel Chris (who serendipitously discovered the session scene when he moved out to the East End full-time) and pianist O’Connell who was originally approached by a donor who offered a substantial sum of money to bankroll the first festival.

“You need to be creative,” Brondal says. “You need to be making a scene for your own life. That’s how I started when I was young, and then it developed into this festival that’s now in its fifth year. The community and the concertgoers become investors, shareholders of the festival.”

Did he ever imagine this could happen back in the Bay Burger days?

“To this extent, well, no,” he says. “But what I’ve always known is that we have the chops. We’ve got the skills and the resources to do anything at any size. All we need is a little bit of funding. It’s like a seed. Just give it a little bit of water, and it’ll grow into a full-blown sequoia tree.”

Unlike most jazz festivals, Hamptons JazzFest stretches for three months presenting 23 shows at a variety of different performance spaces. It officially opens on July 6 with the Alex Sipiagin Quartet at Masonic Temple in Sag Harbor. For the full schedule, visit hamptonsjazzfest.org.

Based on Shelter Island, Dan Ouellette is a longtime music journalist for DownBeat and author of "The Landfill Chronicles."

Hamptons Jazz Fest Lineup

Southampton Arts Center, 25 Jobs Lane, Southampton

Saturday, July 12 – The Piazzolla Mulligan Project: Tango, Jazz, and Dance Reimagined. Presented in collaboration with Jazz at Lincoln Center.

Saturday, August 2 – Elio Villafranca Quintet: Rhythms Across the Americas. Presented in collaboration with Jazz at Lincoln Center.

Saturday, August 16 – Masters of Jazz — Lenny White, Buster Williams, Benito Gonzalez, Emilio Modeste. Presented in collaboration with Jazz at Lincoln Center.

Sunday, September 7 – Haitian Heritage Celebration featuring Godwin Louis’s Experience Ayiti Project.

Masonic Temple, 200 Main Street, Sag Harbor

Sunday, July 6 – Alex Sipiagin Quartet

Saturday, July 19 – Spike Wilner Trio ft. Simon Moullier

Saturday, September 6 – Hector Martignon Foreign Affair

Saturday, September 27 – Kirk Knuffke Quartet

Hampton Library, 2478 Main Street, Bridgehampton

Wednesday, July 9 – Jake Herzog Quartet

Wednesday, July 23 – Rico Jones’s Bloodlines

Wednesday, July 30 – Neta Raanan Quartet

Second House Museum, 12 Second House Road, Montauk

Sunday, August 10 – Jazz by the Sea: Montauk Jazz Day, featuring Ada Rovatti Organ Trio, Richard Baratta & Gotham City Latin/Jazz Quintet.

The Church, 48 Madison Street, Sag Harbor

Friday, July 18 – Santi Debriano’s Bembe Arktet

Friday, July 25 – Brazilian Voyage with Nilson Matta, Chico Pinheiro

Friday, August 8 – Brian Charette Quartet with Joel Frahm, Sheryl Bailey

Friday, August 29 – Jane Ira Bloom Quartet with Mark Elias, Matt Wilson, Dawn Clement

Bay Street Theater, Long Wharf, Sag Harbor

Monday, August 11 – Harlem Gospel Choir, “The Magic of Motown”

LTV Studios, 75 Industrial Road, Wainscott

Monday, July 7 – Solo Piano: Roberta Piket

Sunday, July 20 – Solo Piano: Phil Markowitz

Friday, August 15 – Camille Thurman Quintet

Monday, August 18 – Solo Piano: Julius Rodriguez

Monday, August 25 – Solo Piano: Bill O’Connell

Thursday, August 28 – Mike Rodriguez Quintet