For Pierre Dørge and his band, music is a language that evolves across cultures

The label ‘world music’ is often accused of being the West’s pretext for sidelining any sound that doesn’t fit with its own genres (just look up David Byrne’s I Hate World Music op-ed in the New York Times), but for Danish jazz musician and composer Pierre Dørge, the term is all about synthesis.
The New Jungle Orchestra is a group of about 10 jazz musicians who travel the world picking up styles from various cultures for their performances. As their director, composer and guitarist, Dørge has his own take on the definition of world music: “The true sense of world music is a fusion music that can be based on one style, like jazz, which incorporates ethnic music from the global village. For me, it’s a question of communication between cultures,” he says.
Dørge, who will perform locally with the NJO later this month, recalls an experience in Mainland China a decade ago that solidified his understanding of world music: “In Shanghai in 1997 we did a concert at the conservatory. Even though we couldn’t speak with the Chinese students there, we could communicate through music. They could understand our music, and we played with them, even though we’d never played together before. I think it’s fantastic with this musical language – it’s a way of communicating and understanding different cultures and, in this way, making peace in the world. Music can really be an ambassador for making peace in this crazy world.”
The composer has come a long way from his childhood interest in non-Western music, stirred by what he refers to now as the “fake African” beat of a Hollywood Tarzan movie. Forty years on, Dørge has travelled and studied music, often with the band, in West Africa, Indonesia, Australia, the Middle East and China – clearly he doesn’t take the call to musical ambassadorship lightly.
“Basically all our music is based on jazz since most of us are jazz musicians,” he says, “but then all these other influences come to us. You see the same thing in food, when you go into a restaurant, you can get Chinese food, but on another day you could get African food, French food, Italian – the food becomes more and more mixed. That’s a picture of how music is today.”
When pressed to be more specific about the interplay between jazz and world music in the orchestra’s performance, Dørge suggests an organic blend. “The music is played by jazz musicians – that’s musicians from Western countries and one from Africa. So when we play something that might sound Chinese – for example, using the Chinese pentatonic scale, then of course it’ll be different than if a Chinese musician played the same song. It’s different because we didn’t grow up with the Chinese tradition, so when we pick up something Chinese, we do it our own way and mix it with our Western style. Sometimes we even put African rhythms in Chinese melodies.”
He describes it further in terms of contrast: “We blend traditional songs with harmony and peace, and suddenly we go into a world of free improvised pieces where the music is atonal. It’s kind of like a picture of beauty in nature, and then the city jungle, the traffic jam – and the musical story crashes into a traffic accident.”
Despite the New Jungle Orchestra’s cultural experiments, their style is heavily steeped in history. Their name hails from Duke Ellington’s 1920’s Jungle music, filled with horn improvisations intended to sound like jungle animals. “You could say the interaction with the different instruments is like a talk, like a story between the animals in the jungle. When you perform, you’re like a musical actor,” Dørge says.
Yet far from merely imitating Ellington, by exploring music culturally the NJO strive to follow his innovation – and, according to Dørge, that is easily condoned by jazz culture, itself a fusion between the traditions slaves brought from West Africa and the European music they encountered in the US. “If you live in China and you want to play jazz, then the nature of jazz is that you take some elements from the pure style and mix it with your own Chinese tradition. And it’s important that people around the world really believe they can make their own way of jazz. That’s a freedom I like very much in the music we play – that there’s room for everybody. Every bird whistles in its own way,” he says.
The NJO will be bringing that spirit of adaptation to their Hong Kong concert. Though customs regulations forbid them from importing some of their more unusual instruments – often made with plant and animal parts – Dørge says they will look for Hong Kong instruments and sounds they can incorporate in their sets. Such sensitivity to local colour is just one of the ways the NJO ensure they “make a dialogue,” in Dørge’s words, with the audience. Others include speaking to the audience (Dørge is also the show’s emcee), and responding musically to their sounds and body language. “It’s not like sometimes you see a jazz band, and they have sunglasses and look down at the ground. They don’t look happy, they don’t communicate with the audience. We try to do it differently,” says Dørge.

Pierre Dørge and the New Jungle Orchestra will perform at 8pm on September 23 at the Hong Kong City Hall. Tickets cost $300, $200 or $150 from URBTIX, 2734 9009.