Mathias Eick
“In a way the trumpet has always been a part of me, like an extension of my body; that was clear to me pretty early, because it felt quite natural. It was the thing closest to my heart.”
Norwegian trumpeter Mathias Eick, who was born in the village of Hem in 1979, took up the piano at five and the trumpet a year later. He recalls that in the family music room “we had a vibraphone, a piano, guitars, trumpets, and a French horn. We were five kids and all of us were playing at least one instrument. My father was really into jazz and was also playing all kinds of instruments, and my mother sang in choirs.” Eick subsequently studied trumpet and double bass at the Trondheim Music Academy.
For many years he was a multi-instrumental member of between-the-genres band Jaga Jazzist. For [...]
“In a way the trumpet has always been a part of me, like an extension of my body; that was clear to me pretty early, because it felt quite natural. It was the thing closest to my heart.”
Norwegian trumpeter Mathias Eick, who was born in the village of Hem in 1979, took up the piano at five and the trumpet a year later. He recalls that in the family music room “we had a vibraphone, a piano, guitars, trumpets, and a French horn. We were five kids and all of us were playing at least one instrument. My father was really into jazz and was also playing all kinds of instruments, and my mother sang in choirs.” Eick subsequently studied trumpet and double bass at the Trondheim Music Academy.
For many years he was a multi-instrumental member of between-the-genres band Jaga Jazzist. For ECM he has recorded with Jacob Young (Evening Falls, Sideways), Iro Haarla (Northbound, Vespers), and Manu Katché (Playground). Eick has performed with musicians of many styles, from Chick Corea and the Trondheim Jazz Orchestra to Norwegian psychedelic rock band Motorpsycho. As a trumpeter Eick has absorbed many influences – he cites Miles, Clifford Brown, Kenny Wheeler, Tomasz Stanko, Arve Henriksen and Nils Petter Molvær as inspirations – and shaped a language of his own, which incorporates the history of the modern trumpet. He says: “I didn't want to sound like a copy of any of them. That was a big challenge. It was good to break that barrier.”
The Door, Eick’s first leader album, proved a fine showcase for his writing and musicianship – his exceptional trumpet playing, but also his multi-instrumentalism: he's also heard on guitar and vibraphone. John Fordham in the Guardian praised “his silky, unbrasslike sound, ideally suited to this undulating groove-landscape”. With his next album, Skala, the line-up was expanded, incorporating two drummers, reflecting an overall conception that was “wider and bigger in all directions”, according to Eick. What didn’t change was the emphasis on the lyrical soloist at the centre of things. Inspirations came from a wide variety of music, from classical to pop.
Most recently, on Midwest, Eick reflected on distances travelled in an intensely melodic set of original folk-inflected compositions, which makes an imaginative journey from the tiny village where he grew up to the vast plains of Dakota in the American Midwest, an intercontinental journey made by hundreds of thousands of Eick’s compatriots over a century ago. John Kelman called the result “[Eick’s] most well-conceived and mature outing yet”.
In 2007 Mathias Eick received the International Association of Jazz Educators’ International Jazz Award for New Talent.
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