Hello and welcome to the Keyboard Chronicles, a podcast for keyboard players.
I'm your host, David Holloway, and I'm thrilled as always to be here with you.
I'm also thrilled to be introducing this episode's guest, Mr.
Jacob Magnuson.
As you'll hear, I'm struggling to think, and we have lots of guests on with amazing diverse careers, but the diversity doesn't get much more interesting than Jacob's career.
So as you'll hear,
He has traversed everything from Icelandic symphonies to a wonderful career in both film and TV work and recording work and live performance in the UK and the USA.
Jakob also, as you'll hear, happens to be a parliamentarian in the Icelandic parliament and has made some direct impacts on the lives of musicians there and has some really
interesting thoughts on how musicians actually make
are living in a more substantial way than a lot of us experience.
So yeah, I think there's a lot to really enjoying this and I'll talk to you at the end of the show.
Yeah, Colby, it's an absolute pleasure to have you on the show.
I cannot thank you enough for taking the time, particularly late at night there.
I did not ask before we started recording.
I assume you're home in Iceland at the moment?
I am back in Iceland now, yes.
And it's almost mid -moment.
Yes, yes.
So it's amazing speaking from literally the other end of the world to you.
I thought we would start off...
Just talking about your year this year.
So I do want to talk about your latest album in a second, but just more broadly, what, how has 2024 been for you?
Has it been a busy year?
Absolutely.
Fantastic.
And I've had so much fun with, you know, completing the album and getting it out there.
And we've had amazing reviews from all over the world.
Best reviews ever.
And it's
Then I just got back from Spain a few days ago, where I was in Malaga and Marbella and had some fantastic times there with musical activity and social activities.
I've had an amazing time and an amazing life.
I'm very glad to be with you.
speaking from top of the world all the way to where you are.
We sometimes joke when we say we do gigs here.
Good evening, ladies and gentlemen.
Or if you're, or good morning if you're in Australia, because we generally do not do much communication, but because of the different times that we are on.
Midnight in Iceland is what time in Australia?
Yeah, so it's just before 10 a here.
So you're quite right.
It is morning time.
Right.
Yeah.
So let's talk about you just mentioned your amazing album Future Forecast.
So I'm really fascinated to hear more about this because my understanding is there are I think you improvised up to 72
tracks of potential music.
So it goes without saying, how did you curate or narrow that down to the final seven tracks on the album?
Well, first of all, let me say that this whole project was something that you could never have planned for or organized in a conventional way.
was suggested I, you know, come to the Floki Studios in the high north in the of Iceland.
an amazing place and to bring my favorite musicians from Iceland along.
Then as it happened, our drummer had a bit of an accident, so we had to find another drummer.
And who else?
Pete Erskine.
And then the bass player we were planning to have was overseas on that particular weekend or week.
So we got Matthew Garrison on bass.
an old schoolmate of Schooly's, who was originally set to be with us.
And then basically we decided we would, you know, stay away from predictabilities and cliches, try and refrain from any sort of predictable ideas.
I assumed that both Matthew Garrison and Pete Erskine
were quite accustomed to just going somewhere, setting up, sound testing, and then starting to play.
But as it happens, nobody in that whole team had ever been involved in such an optimistic session out in the middle of nowhere.
All charts were banned.
There was one chart allowed to be included.
That was a tribute from our percussionist, Anors Giving, to his childhood and teenage and adult idol, Pete Erskine.
So that is called Icchiamo, that track.
But otherwise, we just sat down and let it begin.
And it just came to us, as opposed to us chasing it, so to speak.
So once we started and things went so beautifully we just couldn't stop and we just kept playing one track after another and I would just suggest maybe a C sharp minor plus five
or something and off we'd go.
Peter would start a groove or whatever and then after all these tracks, hours and hours of music came the very
the critical part of actually choosing from that raw material what seven tracks would be worked on and then completed.
And that took months.
Yeah, it would have taken months.
And is that the first time you've taken that approach?
Really?
Yes.
I did an album called Two Sisters many years ago and parts of that album
I been thought of improvised, but I've never gone into a studio with the sheer determination to not have anything prepared, nothing to read or follow.
And I wasn't, even though I was the one to kind of administer and pull everyone together, I tried not to be a bossy person.
I was allowing for everyone's creativity just to...
you know, contribute and be part of the whole thing.
And if you call it a future forecast from the beginning and say, how could music possibly sound in 10, 15, 20 years?
And how can we make it creative and different from anything else out there or anything else we've done before?
That's a good framework to start.
If you have a clear framework to start,
creative freedom seems to come to you easier.
And that's exactly what happened.
Great perspective.
And look, for our listeners, I will be linking to the album in our show notes.
is an amazing piece of work to listen to.
mean, for the record, Jakob, mean, my favourites probably Love Space, Pasadena, Dream of Delphi, and I know Wildcard's been a success for you as well.
Just amazing stuff.
So look forward to passing that on to our listeners.
So let's jump way back in time now and our common question for guests is your musical upbringing.
during your childhood and teenage years, what was it that got you passionate about music?
Well, my parents lived in New York in the 50s, in the heyday of American jazz.
And they brought a huge collection of records with them, anything from Oscar Peterson, Ella Fitzgerald, and Louis Armstrong, all that.
and stankettes and all that stuff.
So I had a very healthy musical diet and they were both very musical.
My mother was a classically trained pianist, know, concert pianist status kind of thing, although she never allowed herself to pursue a career.
My father had a beautiful singing voice and a very keen ear for harmony and keyboard playing.
He was an organist.
And basically it was no option other than me and my sister.
one sister who we would go and study piano.
And then when I wanted to start joining bands at the tender age of 13 or 14, they didn't really want me to do that.
They saw too many young, talented musicians start in the music business, stop.
going to school and becoming hooked on alcohol and drugs.
So they said to me, if you want to be a musician, we want you to study trumpet and become a trumpeter for the Icelandic Symphony.
And so I did for a couple of years.
And I remember some of the members of that band.
I was then put into a band at the Music Conservatory of Reykjavik.
And they were actually members of the Icelandic Symphony.
And I tried so hard to live up to the standards.
and I went bleeding in the mouth.
My lips were bleeding after the rehearsals.
So after a couple of years of that, I said, well, shut up.
I want to play my organ, play my piano and play my eventually other keyboards.
So this is how it actually happened.
But a very musical home, my parents would have, my father was a member of choir.
After the concerts of the choirs, everyone came home to our house.
My mother had the piano and they all sang, they sang Cole Porter and they all sang all sorts of music.
But then something drastic happened.
Guess what?
The Beatles.
When the Beatles came, everything changed.
And my attention, you know, went from the jazz records over to these four.
Mop Tops from Liverpool and their two or three part harmonies and their lovely melodies and instrumentation.
What a fabulous outfit.
What an incredible adventure that was.
And then later in life, I had the privilege of bringing Ringo Sarr to play with my band here in Iceland, which is unforgettable.
Wow, we definitely need to come back to that.
But this is the long or the short of it basically.
Long answer to your short question.
But this is basically how it happened.
No, that's great.
And I do want to go back to the trumpet.
So what was it about the trumpet that wasn't able to provide you the interest or the excitement that playing the organ or piano did?
Basically.
It was too much pressure on me to perform at symphony orchestra standards with symphony orchestra players.
It was just too painful.
And I really, I was so smitten by jazz and pop music that I figured, well, classical music, I'll come back to that later in life, which I certainly have.
I love classical music as well, but I'm so happy that I didn't become a hired
trumpeter in a stage -run symphony orchestra.
I'm forever grateful for having been granted the freedom just to follow my heart and my intuition.
Yes, and as you know, there is a lot less body fluids such as saliva involved with keyboards.
Trumpets are very messy instruments at times.
Well, there's been saliva, you know, in my pop career, of course.
in a different context to what you're referring to here.
That's right.
No, that's great.
Thank you, Jakob.
so from that, I know you did go back to the US and train.
Was there a period of time between seeing the Beatles and wanting to explore jazz and pop and going back to the US?
Were you playing in bands around Iceland or you?
Yeah.
What was the?
Funnily enough, when I was 15, I was a year ahead of my age in the sense that I was a fast learner.
I was put in with 12 year olds when I was only 11 and all that stuff, or actually started when I was eight.
So basically, I always had that one year to kind of...
fall back on and my parents gave me that one year to actually go and play the music that I love to play before I would then be sent to university to study medicine.
That was their plan.
But then that year, that one year, basically my high school band was I founded when I was 15, became a college band, is still my band after all these years, believe it or not.
and several other members of that band are on the Future Forecast recording.
That band is called Stummen and is one of the most successful bands of Icelandic music history.
And we've also made films, including the biggest film in Icelandic film history, which I produced and we all starred in.
It's called On Top.
It's not a porno movie.
It's a kind of a musical comedy, but a future forecast in itself.
because in the film we portray what was about to happen in Icelandic society.
It is, this was right in the early 80s when the first democratically elected president in the world had been elected, President Rigtis, who been our French teacher at college by
the way, and the first all -female parliamentary group had been elected to parliament.
So we were kind of inspired by this.
So we had this young, all female group called the Witches, Gríllur, play a backing harmony group in a film, basically a road movie about Stúdmen playing sort of ironic comic
versions of themselves.
This is pre -Spinal Tap, but Spinal Tap produces actually...
wanted to buy this film to prevent it from confusing their marketing strategy.
The spinal tap came a year or two later.
So anyways, what happens in the film is that the male singer and the female backing singer are up here and the male singer chooses the keys of the songs.
He chooses everything and he's telling her to be sexy.
Titties forwards, belly in on all this male chauvinistic crap.
She basically tells them shut up you chauvinistic bastard.
This is it.
Our relationship is over.
And she tells the girls we're going against them.
We're going to compete with them on the market.
And this is what they do.
And they beat them and make fools of them in the end of the movie.
It's a very funny film.
Played every national holiday, every national day in Iceland year after year.
decade after decade because it's what actually happened in Icelandic society.
Women demanded equality and they got it.
So we are number one in the world in terms of gender equality.
We're number one in the world as well when it comes to human rights and you know accepting and respecting all you know genders and whatever you fancy and so forth.
Our gay pride.
Every year, beginning of August is the biggest gay pride in the world, at least per capita, but it's bigger than our National Day parade and all that.
So what our movie basically did was to create a future forecast of the society that changed from a typical male chauvinistic society to an equal, you know, mutually
respectful society, which we couldn't be more grateful for.
This is the reason this film is basically has created an ongoing demand for Stoodman, the group that I formed at the age of 15.
So we're extremely grateful.
And I was unaware, Jakob, that Stoodman started when you were that young, because I certainly had a question here around the amazing longevity of that group.
mean, you're 16, more than 16 albums.
into a history.
my question was going to be, how have you maintained that cohesive relationship over that long?
It sounds to me part of it is you started very young with with close friends is my guess, but.
You're spot on in that.
It's that is, you know, when you meet somebody at that age and you put your hands together and you become a success from the first gig onwards and then you start doing
albums and they all become like the fastest album selling albums of history in Iceland and then we make the movie and because the biggest movie it's inevitably becomes you know
tighter and tighter and we're glued together classmates from college so and then what actually happened that what we were a school band
And then that one year I was allowed to start playing on the open market at the tender age of 18.
And then our drummer had actually temporary left for Sweden.
His parents insisted that he go and study some stuff in Sweden.
So we had to find a drummer.
Nobody could play those types of broken beats, seven eight and five four.
It was kind of a prog rock type of an era leading to jazz rock, you could say.
So we had to find a drummer from Britain called Dave Tufort who played with Mike Oldfield, Arthur Brown or all sorts of people.
So we spent three months rehearsing with him.
We built our own PA system, our own lighting system, our own back projection.
It's a very advanced Pink Floyd type of a show.
And we took this on the road to Iceland and then the musicians union intervened and said, there's been a, somebody's filed a complaint.
and the Musicians Union in Iceland was founded to keep the Americans and the Brits away from the best jobs because after the war they all got the best gigs.
So Icelandic musicians had their union to make sure they got the gigs.
So hence we were given a very harsh two option, either that drummer leaves within a week or you'll be taken to court Mr.
Magnusson.
We all had an emergency meeting and we decided that the drummer said, well, come with us to Britain.
There's plenty of us to do for us to do there.
And so we did.
All except the lead singer.
He had failed his maths at the college graduation.
So we were a bit stuck.
And I got a job as a keyboard player with Long John Baldry, the first white blues singer in Europe, he's sometimes called.
was a legendary blues singer.
who had backing singers called Rod Stewart and Mick Jagger, a drummer called Charlie Watts, a pianist called Elton John.
And to be offered a Hammond Organist role in his incredible band of the Ten Jays of 18 in London was an opportunity too good to turn down.
And that actually led me on a tour to America with
gave me a very unexpected record deal once we landed in Los Angeles just a few days later.
this is the long and the short of that.
So you went from Iceland to the UK.
What are your recollections, A, of that move to the UK as a young man?
And also, do you recall what sort of instruments you were playing by that stage and how you were discovering new keyboards?
I know you're mostly playing organ and so on, but just, yeah, what was your approach there?
Well,
At that time, this is the 70s and the Hammond organ was very much my favorite instrument besides the grand piano.
Those two instruments I was playing mostly with Baldry at the time.
Then I got an electric piano and an ARP synthesizer and an Elka sort of a string machine.
Herbie Hancock and the Hatch Hunters at the time were using
some sort of string machine so he could have sort of a sustained chords while he was soloing and stuff like that.
So these were type of the early instruments I got.
Clavinet, I was also using a Clavinet.
And then when I got in to LA, I basically got involved with all the synthesizers.
And in fact, I came very close with Alan Howarth, who was Joe Zavens
synthesizer programmer and keyboard technician.
And he had a deal with Roger Lin, who created the Lin drum machine.
And he also had a relationship with Sequential Circuits in Northern California.
We got all that gear when we were actually, I got him to help me do a soundtrack to a documentary I was making.
And that was, we had samplers, emulator, fair lights and all the instruments were brand new then.
so extremely exciting times.
And we formed a duet and we took on the road with big projectors and things.
And we took that on the road in the States, took it around Iceland, took it around Europe, something called the Magnetics.
And it was certainly the first electronic music.
group of Iceland, you could say, and one of the very first in Europe and the US as well.
But that is kind of outside our scope of the jazz -oriented stuff that we're dealing with now in the jack -and -magnet science.
Yes, absolutely.
I mean, that's incredibly diverse.
And so do you recall, as you just said, being immersed in all that new technology?
How did that change your approach as a player?
So obviously you'd had education in Iceland, you'd been used to a more classical approach, got interested in jazz and pop and now you're in LA immersed in a whole bunch of new
technology.
Did it impact how you played?
Absolutely.
basically, I must admit, I wasn't really prepared.
I was kind of thrown into this.
I was back in Iceland for a couple of years at university, an obedient young student boy and pleasing my parents.
that Easter boulder recalled me for a two week tour of America.
This is after I toured Europe with them previously.
so a two week tour of the North America became a three week tour, four, five, six ended after 13 weeks in Los Angeles.
And
A week later I have an incredible record contract with Warner Brothers and that gave me access to all the best players in the States, all the best instruments and I could use
whatever keyboards I fancied.
of course, synthesizers, Prophet became one of my favorite synthesizers, Prophet 5 and the emulators shortly afterwards.
Then came the
Oberheim and all these sounds very much influenced my style.
My self -taught style, remember there were no jazz schools in Iceland.
I invented my own style, my own technique and basically played differently to most anyone I know because it's I have never gone to.
a discipline like a Berkeley or a school like that.
I've taken a few private lessons though.
Yeah, no, it's a really great point.
I was going to ask you about that.
So aside from the trumpet lessons and obviously your mother being a great piano player, you've had some private lessons, but otherwise pretty much self -taught, which is amazing.
Yeah.
Even the teacher I had in Iceland, my piano teacher, he banned me from playing by ear.
He banned me from tapping my foot to keep rhythm and so forth.
It was a totally very strict kind of German Austrian approach to music.
The great masters were the only masters.
They kind of detested jazz and pop because they didn't understand it.
It was a different cup of tea for them.
So you have to find your own way and
It was probably a good recipe for developing a style that wasn't based on anyone else.
Although of course, listening to Herbie and listening to Zabino, listening to everyone else would influence any young man.
And basically the evolution of all this, using all the different sounds and all that.
After all these years it really kind of comes down to when I'm at home and sit at the grand piano, my mother's grand piano that I studied when I was a child.
That is home for me.
With all respect to all the synthesizers in the world, all the electronic keyboards and the Hammond organs, my favorite instrument after all
is the grand piano that I got to know as a five -year -old.
Right, Felice.
Yeah, could not agree more.
And so just before we move away from that LA scene, obviously the first Jack Magnet album in 1981, your recollections of that first, you know, really intensive period of creating
music in the studio, what are your recollections of that?
Well, basically, my very first solo album
Actually, I had Phil Collins on drums and that was the album I had with me on the tour and the album that really led to my deal with Warner Brothers.
That album starts off, it's an album about afterlife.
It's a story line, a concept album about somebody who goes fishing on the west coast of Iceland.
Weather becomes very nasty.
He, the boat sinks, he drowns and he is reflecting on his life throughout the 12 songs and those 12 songs it actually when I, it goes from mambo, it goes from gospel through pop,
through rock, through jazz and windsack in a sort of a, you know, merger of prog rock and jazz rock towards the end of it.
When I listened back to that album after I made it, I said to myself, it was the only time that's happened to me.
I said, Jesus, did I write that album all by myself, both the lyrics and the music and arrange it and everything?
It was like somebody else had actually done it through me.
It was almost like a medium type of experience.
And with hindsight, when I brought this album to LA, brought it to Chrysalis,
where I was invited to a meeting, Tom Trumbo, he instantly asked for a copy of the album.
I said, this is the only copy I have, you can have the cover.
And he put it up on his wall and Terry Ellis and Chris Wright, offered me a great record deal.
And then I got this great lawyer in LA to finalize a deal and he told Warner Brothers about it and they offered me an even better deal.
And basically,
I realized only a few years ago that this album, my very first album called Horthy Rådvan or kind of looking into the red sky, it's a bad translation, but it was a retrospective of
popular music from the middle or beginning of the 19th, 20th century through to the kind of latter half of it.
with the evolution of music as it actually happened, but it was not done consciously.
This came out like that.
basically the next album and the first album I do for Warner Brothers is Special Treatment.
That's where I get like a former band with Dave Logerman on drums, with people like Sapa, Frank Sapa, Steve Anderson on bass who became my co -writer and collaborator and Carlos
Rias on guitar.
was with Chico Ria and it was kind of a
special friend and student of Larry Carlton.
So that album became the first album I did in the US.
got a lot of airplay and it was released in Scandinavia, US and Asia.
And then my second album in States became a concept album based on a character, an alter ego.
I had
been given the nickname by my British friends in the Baldrige, Long John Baldrige group.
They were playing with words and saying things like, see the Lobby Cubby, Yakup, that is my nickname.
good morning, Mr.
Magnet.
it's Jack Magnet.
Instead of Jacob Magnuson, they started calling me Jack Magnet.
And then I built on that for my second Warner Brothers album.
a character who had the abilities to use his magnetic powers, and there are people in the world who can actually do that, to attract metal objects to his body with his magnetic
powers only.
And I built the whole album and the lyrics on that stuff.
then that name lingered.
I didn't use it as an artist name until many, many years later.
Did an album for Woodward Avenue with
Paul Brown, my first close friend in the USA and my best US friend.
He's a producer of many very successful albums and a solo artist in his own right, a guitarist.
So basically Jack Magnet became my alter ego, slowly but surely, and then we decided to create Jack Magnet Science with these...
the group of players who appear in future forecasts.
Exactly.
And it's really hard, Jakob, to nail down some specific times and albums here because your career has been so prolific.
So I thought I would ask you, there three artists you've collaborated with over that time that have made the biggest impression on you, that you continue to inspire you or you
continue to work with them today?
What are the three other musicians that you've really
stood out for you?
Well, funnily enough, it's a very close family.
could say that if there was a jazz prophet in Iceland or a preacher of American culture, American jazz, that was a man named John Bully Arneson.
He was
the voice of Icelandic radio for years and years.
He was a trumpeter himself.
He was a great songwriter.
Some of the most famous and beloved songs were by him.
He, after my parents' divorce, became my mother's boyfriend for about five years.
Then they split.
He moved to the north of Iceland.
Shortly afterwards, he found another lady and
He happened to be the mother of Aetor Gunnarsson, who is one of my closest friends.
He's been with Stubman for 27 years and he's also the founder of Mezzo Forte.
And he is probably my favorite keyboard player in the world.
So it's great to have him with you as a collaborator and he's an incredible
an tasteful musician with an incredible ear.
And he wrote Iceland's first global hit called Garden Party by Metzl Forti back in 83.
So here we have a kind of a sort of a like a family relationship between us.
I asked him to join Stutman back in 1998.
He's been with us ever since.
Now for 17 years I was with the Wraga.
who is the vocalist of Studman and still is.
We had a fantastic time.
We made some great projects together.
Besides Studman, we did the human body percussion ensemble.
did a rock and the Jack Magic Orchestra, fantastic album.
Came out in the UK.
she is on Future Forecast as well as our daughter, Disa.
Just these three people, my former wife, continuing friend and collaborator in music, Raga, our daughter, Disa, who is a lead singer with Trent DeMuller, the famous Danish act,
traveling the world, doing concerts and festivals with massive attack and all sorts of big acts.
Disa, if I had to name one album.
that I can listen to forever.
That's her debut album from the tender age of 19.
album that played out.
that would be my first album on a remote island I wanted to have with me.
And Raga has been with me in so many musical adventures, still is.
We have a new student track in the charts at the moment that we wrote together.
and we also have many other projects.
Aether of course.
So these three people are probably the most influential.
Besides them, I have to say the most inventive jazz composer and player, what two of the most favorite I could mention right here.
I have both Matt and
listened to for forever.
That's Wayne Shorter who passed away last year and that is Joe Zanull who passed away in 2007.
We shared Alan Howarth, he was our keyboard technician and synthesizer programmer and I did an album with Alan called The Magnetics and toured the world with him.
So now I mentioned a few names that you will give you and besides all this
I have to mention Joni Mitchell.
wow.
I was so privileged to kind of wander accidentally into the studio where she was doing the hissing of Summer Lodge with Henry Louis.
And I just stumbled in there.
She was in the middle of doing background vocals for her own song, Shadows and Light.
They invited me into the studio.
They were ever so nice to me.
And I was involved.
They asked me to help with writing faders in a cross mix and getting involved with mixing that album.
It's amazing.
This was shortly after I moved to LA, before I moved to LA.
So when I moved to LA and got the record deal, I decided Henry Lewis should be the producer.
I felt so grateful, I felt I should get him involved.
But Joni Mitchell is probably my all -time favorite artist.
She is the most remarkable songwriter ever.
And her amazing song, Both Sides Now, as arranged and conducted by Vince Mendoza in Los Angeles, is my all -time favorite track.
There we go.
No, that's, yeah, that's an amazing stumbling into Joni Mitchell.
It doesn't get much better than that.
I do want to go back, Jakob, to you mentioned Stoodman and the fact that you're like a family.
And as you've just mentioned, your former wife is part of the band or whatever.
What are the opportunities and the challenges of having such a close knit?
group as far as creating new work.
Does it allow you to be brave in creating new work because you know everyone so well or does it actually make it harder?
Well, thing is that Stillman is a very different project to Jack Magnet Science and a very different project to like Ragga and the Jack Magic Orchestra or the Body Percussion
Ensemble.
Stillman is very much a
popular songwriter kind of based group and our songs are designed for people to learn and sing and be played on the radio and so forth.
So, I mean, we know exactly what we're doing in that regard and very much inspired by the way the Beatles work.
writing songs and getting great lyrics and getting great arrangements, great production in the studio.
That is basically what students do and that's the secret formula behind their lasting success through the decades.
knowing people so well, knowing that everyone can improvise and just make things up on the spot is
the other side of this thing.
You have these close friends and associates from your teenage years.
You can take them anywhere and just say, let's start playing something.
Let's make something up.
Let's just improvise.
Let's flow.
And then that happens.
So you could say the five of the Jack Magnet science group are students.
And that is
It's a wonderful thing that you can put them in different situations and put them in, you know, say that now we're not going to create a pop song for radio, we're going to do
something entirely different.
We're going to just make things up on the spot and then we'll work on it and we'll create structures and we'll create melodies and we'll do the soloing and we'll let it flow.
like you mentioned Space Pasadena is very much like designed like a journey through landscape where you're not really kind of there's no chorus there's no head there really
well there's a head but you only hear it once and then you go through different you know over hills and into forests and things like that and cross rivers so that was very much
the concept of the future forecast
was to move away from your conventional structures and ideas of us, how things should sound or be written.
That's brilliant.
And I do want to take a bit of a sidestep if you don't mind.
Your ability to envisage large landscapes in music, your knowledge of society, your well -traveled times in both the UK and US, is that what led to you
during the, I believe it was in the 90s, you becoming a cultural attache in London for the Icelandic embassy.
I'm just fascinated by that because that's, although you may not have been directly involved in politics as such, it's still an amazing honor to be doing something like that.
And what was your experience of doing that?
Well, it was actually going with the flow has been very much the recipe for me and trusting that.
things will work out and that we'll manage.
There was a plan in the, well, let's begin with Margaret Thatcher, the British Prime Minister who took over in British politics when Britain was on the verge of bankruptcy
really.
They gathered a lot of wealth from other colonies and then they lost.
a lot of their wealth in the two world wars, the 20th century, and then Harold Wilson, the politics went out of hand, and the economy went to the ground, so it dropped the ball, and
Margaret came in and she slashed all budgets, and everything was down to nitty gritty, and there were strikes, and there were frustrations, and there was punk and all that.
respected cultural institutions like the Barbican Centre in London, they had to find a way of surviving, pay their salaries and so forth.
There was no more grants as they've been used to.
So they're thinking, who can we go to, to, you know, find some money and some monetary stability?
Let's go to Scandinavia.
Let's offer them the biggest cultural festival of Scandinavian arts and culture ever held.
and let's get all the ambassadors involved, make them patrons and let them guarantee that their heads of state will all join us for the opening of this in 1993, the first time
since 1337 that all the heads of state of Scandinavia, the Nordic countries team up with the British royal family.
So this all sounded great and all the cultural attachés of the Nordic countries were really impressed.
their ambassadors were very keen and all the heads of state committed except the cultural attaché of the Icelandic embassy had fallen ill so he had gotten Alzheimer's and Iceland
was very behind in organizing its contribution.
So at the last minute I was called in as a creative
person with the experience of doing concerts and films and this and that festivals and I had very little time and no money.
So I was summoned to actually become the cultural attache of the embassy and I managed to turn things around very swiftly and it became an incredibly colorful sort of run and
promotion of
over 1000 artists over the next four five years.
And a very inspiring type of a task but demanding at the same time.
So it was difficult.
Then I became the the charge of affairs of the embassy, the head of the embassy basically.
So there was less time available for for music, but we still did.
Me and Raga did.
Regular gigs at the Jazz Cafe and in Camden Town we did kind of jazz stuff with members of the you know some you know like some great British musicians and We managed to do the
Ragtime Jack Magic project.
We managed to do the body a human body percussion ensemble and some other stuff as well made in Reykjavik my solo album the piano album I did with only the grand pianos
So if there's enough hours in the day as well as the night, you can get things done.
You can do your day job and then get on to the evening and the weekend and get things done that way.
So as the charge defers at the embassy, did you ever have any temptation to progress a career in diplomacy or politics?
I was actually supposed to do this only for a year.
to save our presence at the Barbican Centre, the biggest Nordic cultural festival ever held.
As it happened, we got the biggest exposure.
We were last minute in with the least budget, but with creative ideas and publicity and so forth, we managed to turn things around.
And I was hired for a lifetime as a diplomat in the Foreign Office of Iceland.
I still am in fact.
a cultural counselor of the Foreign Ministry of Iceland for life.
But the moment I found myself hired for life, I got paralyzed.
I saw myself sitting in a gray suit in a gray office and just kind of slowly dying from boredom.
So I decided to...
say things but know things but it was I spent a number of years in the 90s in the UK I actually got offered a great job after five years in the embassy and so that was in the IT
business where I had a studio there as well so I did actually I've always been interested in social matters in putting in my you know
five P of knowledge and ideas to help make society better, fairer and more colourful.
And that has actually led to the fact that I'm still the councilor for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
And I actually have a seat in the parliament of Iceland.
So you may is in your planning on running for office or?
I am.
I did run.
I've been there three years.
I am an MP as well.
I did not realise that.
So there you go.
You've answered my question.
Right.
Yeah.
But I mean, that is, I do that because I have a way of getting things.
I managed to get a lot of bills through parliament as the head of the
the Composers Guild of Iceland.
So we have a great, I've gotten about 12 bills through parliament with just explaining things metaphorically.
For instance, I think we are the first country in the world to have, say, music royalties diagnosed and accepted as bearing not income tax, but
capital gains tax, which is only a fraction of what income tax is.
And I use the following metaphor for the ministers.
This is in the year 2019, before I took a seat in parliament.
said, there's two brothers at work.
One of them is building apartments and houses from wood and glass and concrete.
And he rents out these apartments and he pays capital gains off the rent.
The other brother is building from
different materials, is frequencies of music, lyrics and visuals and so forth.
He builds up blocks of songs and catalog of music, which he owns the author's rights for.
He is the owner.
He will rent out a song for a play here, for a commercial there, or a movie or whatever, but he always owns the property.
So basically,
The Minister of Finance suddenly realized what I was talking about.
had taken many years before me to try and get this through.
He said, he met me at the gas station and said, Jacob, I've realized what you've been talking about now.
This is a great concept.
Intellectual property and real property should be taxed the same way.
Which means that we are the best tax haven for music royalties in the world.
writer's royalties, performance royalties, and publishers' royalties.
And then I also introduced another bill which is actually, most countries have these rebates on film making to attract big film projects to their countries.
You know, have it in Australia, you have it New Zealand, all over the world.
I said to a minister back in 2018, well, if you do it for the films,
you know, we should do it for the music as well.
This was end of term and that minister became very excited.
name is, she said, let's do it, let's do it.
And we ran as fast as we could.
And we had this amazing 25 % rebate on all recording costs in Iceland, including travel and hotels and everything.
And this has revolutionized the industry here.
We do a lot of Hollywood scores, a lot of...
Big projects here in Iceland because first of all, the studios are relatively inexpensive.
And when you get 25 % rebate, which is gonna rise to 30 and 35 eventually, know, becomes a fantastic ideal spot to come to record and create.
Absolutely.
And I'm assuming that's a source of huge pride for you.
as a parliamentarian actually making direct impacts on the lives of musicians, not just in Iceland, but hopefully setting example for other countries and jurisdictions to pick up.
I just think it's my duty as a well -known citizen here for a long time to assert my influence and use my know -how, abilities and network to make things better.
not only for my peers and colleagues, but also for those from the humbler walks of life.
So I'm a member of the People's Party and we focus on those from the humbler walks of life to make their lives better and safer, more optimistic.
That's superb.
Yeah.
And so there's around 63 members of parliament.
So that's amazing.
And I believe, so you're up for election if I'm, by Googling is correct, in September next year is the next election?
And are you planning on standing again?
I haven't really decided.
I I like this very, very much.
It's a great place to work.
I love all the 63 people in the parliament and all the 160 -something that work there.
And it's a very demanding job.
You have to read a lot of bills.
take a lot of meetings with people who have to give their opinion on whether this field should be passed or not.
So there's pros and cons, but it's the most educational job I've ever done.
But as long as I can keep doing my music and keep creating new works and so forth, you know, as I've been doing now, yeah, why not?
Let's see what happens.
Look, I would love and I apologize, we're getting close to time.
I would love to spend three hours talking about the politics because that's an area of interest of mine, but we'll move back reluctantly to the music.
so you mentioned even when you were the cultural attache in London and the previous person had developed Alzheimer's.
So there was a potential train wreck of a situation there for you that you resolved.
Have you had
and on stage or behind the scenes train wreck where something's spectacularly wrong that you can laugh about now.
Yeah, well, there is one particular moment which I have to share with you.
This is back in the 80s when we, mean, me and Alan Howarth have been so inspired.
I had gone to Brazil and made a documentary about the first immigrants of Iceland, the first people who fled Iceland.
after very harsh winters in the 1800s.
And there were a few opportunities.
One was to go to Australia, one was to go to Canada, one was to go to Brazil.
And the deal from Brazil seemed like the best one.
So several of them went there and I went to trace them.
They been lost and forgotten.
And this is, of course, 1863, whatever is way before Bossa Nova.
It's way before
Icelandic folk music.
So what kind of music do you put to that?
You just get the latest samplers and synths and things and create something that has no time limits or no...
So this is how actually that project, we called it the historical glimpse of the future.
Me and Alan Howard, the group was called the Magnetics.
So after we put the music track to the film,
The came out, it's been on television many, many times.
We go on tour in the States and it's all, is it 50 hertz in the US that you use, but 60 hertz in Europe.
Am I right?
vice that's right, Yeah.
Anyways, we have this, this is how we set it up.
We create the music.
We have a full set of music.
But we also decorated the music with visuals, which we have on a UMATIC tape.
And the UMATIC tape, you know, this is, nobody has UMATIC tape machines anymore, but back in those days, in the 80s, they were standard.
And we had a SIMTY code on the UMATIC tape with the visuals on it.
The SIMTY code was driving the LIMD drum machine, and the LIMD drum machine was driving the sequences.
which founded the basic tracks of the whole set.
Now we're in a huge hall in Reykjavik with the debut of this amazing new electronic duo.
And all my fans, they fill the halls, they're very excited to...
They think that I'm gonna do stuff from the Jack Magnet album that had come out previously, but they hear, they just see two guys on stage.
And we start the UMATIC device and the visual start, the music starts, and we start playing to it.
Alan played a little bit of saxophone.
I was doing most of the keyboard work.
But then it all stops because the hertz in Iceland are totally different to the hertz that the UMATIC device is made from.
And we had no transformer.
It all went terribly wrong.
And I had one, basically one Prophet 5 synthesizer to save my face and save my reputation for the rest of the evening for a good two hours.
And this is probably the most embarrassing and the most nerve wracking and the most trying experience of my whole musical career.
I get chills when I recall it and remember it.
Somehow the following concept, we managed to get some electronic expert to help us set it up so we could actually continue the tour around Iceland and around Europe with this Hertz
business.
That's amazing.
That's absolutely amazing.
Yeah, I would still be getting the chills as well.
I can understand that.
I have to add a little anecdote to this because it's all about hertz frequencies.
bought a 24 truck device for this.
Actually, we hired a 24 truck device, a Stevens recorder for this recording of the Magnetic's historical glimpse of the future as we call the album.
The album was just released by a New York label a couple of years ago.
Now that...
Basically, machine was the best machine before digital machines.
This is what Pink Floyd used, Dealer Dan used.
There was a guy called John Stevens who had built these.
These were all handmade and only a limited number of them in the world.
So after using it for the record, I buy it and I bring it back to Iceland.
a year later, John Stevens himself
comes to Iceland, he's on his way to Salzburg and actually he's gone to Salzburg for the first time in his life, he's gone to Europe.
He goes back to Iceland to look at his machine on the way back and he said to us, you have to be very kind to this machine, never talk about it negatively or send bad vibes to it,
then it'll run forever.
All the majors, the MCIs and Sonys have all tried to figure out
What was the secret behind this little machine?
It was like a black box.
If you opened it, it will all go wrong.
So they couldn't figure it out.
But John was a brilliant electrician.
When he comes to us and looks at the machine, which is fine, he tells us that he had just come from Salzburg.
He had gone to the airport, taken a cab.
said, drive me into town here, drive me up the hill there, to the right you see the churros there, you turn right again there, and that is the house I lived in in my previous
life as Mr.
Hertz, the guy who invented the Hertz.
I'm not joking, this is what he said, and that house was marked with the name, with the shield of Mr.
Hertz.
He remembered his previous life, and he had actually
He was self -educated, had brought from a previous life his entire understanding and knowledge of electronics.
That's an amazing story.
I had to add this to the story about my hurts, the levers.
I'm absolutely glad you did.
Now, my apologies, Jakob, we're running out of time, so I'm going to hit you up with the dreaded question you've already alluded to, which is the five albums.
So you've already mentioned one, but please feel free to mention that again and the other four albums that would be your Desert Island discs.
Well, the album that I listen to most often is not because it's written and sung by my darling daughter, my first child that I can call my own.
It's a self -titled album called DISA.
And she is named after my mother, my deceased mother, Brindis Jakovtotir, who called herself Disa.
And my mother was a visual artist as well as a pianist.
And even her signature on her paintings and her things that she made is the signature of the album.
that's number one.
Number two is an album that I absolutely fell for.
When it came out, I had really fallen for Asia by Steely Dan.
And I still love that very, very much.
Some friends of mine played on that album.
played on my albums as well.
Victor Feldman is one of them.
Jeff Ducaro and people like that.
But more so, Gaucho, Babylon Sisters is the song I can listen to forever.
Absolutely forever.
I'll come back to the one quickly after I finish the other three.
So then I have to really share my love of...
Well, the first Weather Report album I heard was Black Market and I absolutely love the title track which Joe Savile wrote by turning his keyboard upside down so when he plays on
upward scale
it sounds like he's playing a download scale and that's how that melody becomes so unusual and creative.
And then you have the song by Wayne Shorter, Elegant People, on that song which is on an all -time favorite as well.
This is the album that they introduced Jaco Pastorius on.
Alfonso Jones was playing days previously.
And Alex Acuño who played with me as well, he's on that album.
Manolo Badrina who played on my albums as well.
Of course the most famous album by Weller Report was Heavy Weather with Love as well but I want to use my five discs bearing me so these are number one Gaucho number two Black
Market number three number four I have to say Joni Mitchell Once Her Voice Had Gone Down
from the high soprano down to the more husky sounding bass alto voice with Vince Vidoza conducting the orchestra and that song, Both Sides Now, gracing that album.
That is the song I can listen to forever and ever and ever.
So, Both Sides Now, Johnny Mitchell, think Sinatra and about 35 other people have covered that song.
And then last but not least, David, very self -gratifying and selfish, but it's the collaboration of Peter Erskine, Matthew Garrison, Aethur Gunnarsson, Disa Raka, Guðmundur
Pjellason, Phil Doyle, Sintragu Baldursson, Einar Skeving, Ari Braje Kaurason and Thorleivur Góðgull.
an album called Future Forecast.
I can listen to that Jack Magnet Science album over and over again in the car day after day after day.
I never get bored of it.
So I've been listening to it for a year now because it was ready a year ago, although it only came out this year.
And the reviews we've been getting on that album and the feedback from everyone, it's been amazing.
And I'm so grateful for the opportunity given by Wade Coleman and Chris Funk and Chad, who offered me to go to the North of Iceland and just make something up.
They had listened to my entire catalogue.
They figured, why don't we offer him to go and do something?
And I think I used that opportunity, harnessed it in the best way possible.
And I'm extremely proud of it and grateful for having done it.
grateful for everyone who was involved.
Grateful to you, David, for talking about it and letting me rant on about this most amazing adventure of my life in music.
Look, the pleasure is all mine and I cannot thank you enough for spending the time and I would happily talk for another hour, Jakob.
It's actually my deadline that I need to wrap this up, unfortunately.
I would love to reconvene at some stage in the future because you have
mentioned some corridors that we didn't even explore and so your career is and has been amazing and will continue to be amazing and so I'd love to talk in the future but for now
I cannot thank you enough.
Well I'm very grateful I enjoyed speaking with you very much David thanks for initiating this offering me on your show and be happy to speak with you again we can cover a lot of
ground there's a lot of stories a lot of
unbelievable happenings.
I've had so many lives.
I've had so much fun and I'm forever grateful.
And there we have it.
I did say it at the start, but what a career.
I would happily talk for another four hours with Jacob and I'm hoping to catch up with him again at some stage in the future.
I have huge respect for anyone that takes their career in music, diversifies it, and then even gives back to society more broadly through, in his case, his work in parliament.
But yeah, I do highly recommend you listen to the Future Forecast album.
The link is in our show notes.
You can find it on all the streaming platforms and on YouTube.
So do take the time.
It's some amazing timeless music.
So a huge thanks to Jacob for his time and a huge thanks to you for your time.
We always appreciate you listening and we're always thrilled to see our subscriber numbers and our listeners grow.
And they do tend to grow after each episode, which is wonderful.
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