Jonas Hellborg has always been ahead of his time in regard to his playing, his modern sound, and his broad approach to composition. Since he emerged upon the scene in the mid-’70s he’s become synonymous with musical exploration and bass virtuosity, which has been exhibited in his work with the Mahavishnu Orchestra, Public Image Ltd, John McLaughlin, Tony Williams, Bill Laswell, and many others. Perhaps the most stunning example of Hellborg’s prowess came to light when he discovered lost tapes of a recording session from 1986 with legendary Cream drummer Ginger Baker and Parliament Funkadelic keyboardist Bernie Worrell.

Having toured on and off between 1986-1987, Hellborg, Baker, and Worrell hit the studio after a festival appearance to record the five-song album, which would later gain the title The Concert of Europe. Largely improvised, the album spans genres while always bordering the avant garde, as the three masters pull from their personal influences and far beyond. Hellborg’s Wal 4-string and double neck fretted/fretless bass provide profoundly modern tone that somehow holds up even to today’s level of bass technology. We sat down to chat with Hellborg about his fearless playing, advanced sound, and what it was like working as this unlikely trio of music legends.

How did this recording get unearthed after so long?

It had been sitting on my shelf for a long time as multitracks, which I have hundreds of. It was piquing my interest and one day a few years ago I took it down, put it on the tape deck and listened to it, and there was lots of stuff there that I had forgotten about. It seemed like the right time to release it because it was a unique experience. No record existed of the group with Bernie and Ginger. We played together for a large chunk of time, and it was way before when people started recording concerts with their phones. So, the group and the music was not documented. 

What was it like for you to revisit these sessions? Did memories pop up?

What did pop up for me is what incredible musicians they both were and how unique they were. It doesn’t sound like anybody else. Nobody plays like either of them and the interplay and communication is unique. Stylistically, for that time, nobody was doing music like this. There truly was nothing even close.  

How did you put together such an impactful trio?

When it came to Ginger, nobody was really interested in him at the time. He didn’t have any gigs. He was living in Italy farming olives and the only thing that he had done was a few projects with Bill Laswell. At the time he was completely free. When I contacted him he was very happy to go on tour and play drums. With Bernie he was doing Talking Heads a lot, but he had enough space in his schedule to come over and do this. When we’d tour it would be for a few weeks at a time, so it was possible for him.

How did you first meet Ginger? Was it during your work together on Public Image Ltd’s first album? 

We recorded separately on that album, but I really liked what he did so I asked for his contact info. It just so happened that the next month I was on tour in Italy and I called him up. At the time I was playing with John McLaughlin, who had played with Ginger in the ’60s in London, so there was a lot of synergy happening there. Then we became very good friends and we’d play together a lot in Sweden and Italy, which led up to this.

He was known as a very difficult and polarizing figure in music. What was your relationship like with him?

I know he had a certain reputation, but we never had a problem. There’s something to the rumors, of course. He was opinionated and very strong-willed and he was a very bold character. If he had an opinion about something he would express it very clearly. He would butt heads with people. But if you were strong and you challenged him then he was okay. If you were nervous and not honest and were trying to please him or be nice, he couldn’t take that. He liked honest, direct people, that’s who he respected. He was a victim of his own illusions of course. When it came to playing, he was fantastic and he would listen. He had big ears and he could react to anything you threw at him. He didn’t have any prejudice about anything, everything was game for him.

What was it like playing in a rhythm section with him? 

He was always very creative and he reacted to what you’d play in a very musical way. It was not about playing patterns or preconceived grooves. Everything would always be in flux and would change. He would always rather play against me instead of with me, so it wasn’t just his kick drum locked in with my bass. Everything would make up a puzzle of musical phrases. He was always aware and listening and developing his part. Nothing was ever the same night after night, what we played was ever-expanding and taking on different forms. It never felt like just a rhythm section; it was music.

How did you first link up with Bernie?

That was thanks to Bill Laswell because I did a record in New York in 1983 and Bill connected me with Bernie, and he came and played on the record. I really liked Bernie as a person and what I dug about him was that he had a very big scope of music; it wasn’t only funk or rock. He was into classical music and he loved the improvisational aspect of playing and reacting in the moment. Like Ginger, he was always doing something different. He took things a step further every time in very unconventional ways. It was never what you would expect. We also had a personal friendship at the bottom it, which is important to me.

What was it like when you first got in a room together as this trio?

The funny thing is that we never rehearsed. We just went on stage. The first time I played with Ginger was at a festival in Denmark and he just showed up and we walked onstage and played. Never any rehearsals with those guys.

Did you have any mile markers or any preconceived formats going into the performances, or were they entirely improvised? 

This particular recording is some ideas that I had worked out and introduced to them, but of course there was lots of space for improvisation and development within them. But this was a recording session that was done in the studio, which was unique. Any time we performed otherwise it was all unscripted.

How did the recording of this album come about? 

I knew the sound engineer, Tim Hunt, who is somebody I worked with very early in the ’80s. He used to work at a studio called Marcus Music in London. We became very good friends and he wanted me to come and record in the studio, which we did this after playing a jazz festival in London. We had three days to do it and we set up and recorded.

This was when you were mainly playing your Wal basses?

Yes, I had a 4-string with a whammy on it and I played my double neck fretted and fretless, as well. I went straight into the desk and I had a Korg effects pedal system, which was a rack with four slots and you could plug in whatever effects you wanted. I used different distortions and delays and the RAT pedal.

How did you first start playing Wal basses? 

I bought my first Wal bass in a Music Store in Gothenburg, Sweden run by a couple of Brits. After being an Aria endorser for a few years I ran in to the Wal guys—Ian Waller and Pete “The Fish” Stevens—at the Frankfurt Show, I guess it must have been 1983. I had just gotten the gig with Mahavishnu so there was some excitement around me. They asked if they could do something for me. I wanted to play fretless and fretted within the same songs, so I asked if they could make me a double neck. They had already made the famous triple neck instrument for Rick Wakeman’s bassist Roger Newell, so they said a double neck bass would be doable. This first bass was delivered at a Santana concert in Paris by Pete “The Fish” since he was there working on the Rolling Stones mobile recording truck. At a later visit to their workshop I mentioned that I had struck up a friendship with Ginger and that we were about to do some shows together. It turned out that Ian had a whole set of friends in common with Baker and he asked to come hang out for the rehearsals. This took place in Lund, Sweden, where I was living at the time. Wal took some time off, came over and it was a great hang, with playing, dinners, and long nightly discussions and tales told about the glorious end of the ’60s—including Ginger’s manic chase of Jimi Hendrix the night he died. He was convinced that he could have prevented the accident if he had gotten ahold of him!

Do you still have the double neck and the 4-string Wal basses?

Oh yes, I have two of the double necks actually. The second one I got has a midi system in it with wired frets. Every fret has a wire going from it so you can play it with your left hand only like a keyboard. All of the note information comes from the frets and the dynamic information comes from the pickup. The 4-string Wal I was playing had double outputs where one was active and one was passive, and it has a switch on it to go between the two. I had the passive outputs going to the effects and distortion, and the active output was straight into the desk. All of the clean sounds were the active out.

The bass sounds and tones on the record are amazing.

Yes, my Wal basses were incredibly ahead of their time. The quality of the circuits in those basses and the pickups back then are on par with what’s out now. You had Alembic basses in the States that were at that level, but there wasn’t much of anything else at the time that had that modern sound as we know it today.

The album kicks off with the 14-minute “Moon Suite,” which has constantly shifting feels.

I don’t remember recording that [laughs]. We went in and rolled tape and just played and went for it. It developed along the way. Ginger goes into these time modulations and he plays very different kinds of phrasings, so that it becomes different tempos. It can be very easy to lose your time playing along to that. What I decided to do there to highlight it was to keep it really simple and mark out the time with my placements. Then Bernie did a whole orchestral thing on top of it all, which is kind of amazing.            

You then take on John McLaughlin’s “Zakir.” What inspired you to honor your bandmate and choose this piece?

It was one of my favorite songs. I had a few songs that I really loved playing with John, that I played for a while afterwards. With Ginger we used to play that song live, so it made sense for us to play it in this trio. Bernie’s take on it was very nice. With the organ and the strings, he brought a lot to it that hadn’t been there before.

“African Genesis” has some fantastic slapping on it that Bernie weaves through.

It grew and grew and grew when we played it in the studio and it got to this manic state. One of the important sonic factors is that Ginger had this habit of taking one of the ride cymbals from his stand and putting it on top of the tom. It gets that garbage can kind of sound that stands out. He used that here and it sounds super cool. That song became a big showcase for Bernie very. Me and Ginger are just sitting there grooving.

Do you remember what effects you were using to get the sounds on “Tim Hunt”?

I was using a stereo delay with the signal in the middle and different delay times left and right. There might have also been some chorus on there, as well. It was a Korg PME-40X.

What is it that you love about playing in the trio format? 

That’s what I grew up in and it’s the format I function best in. All of my main groups have been trios, either with a keyboard player or a guitar player. There’s a dynamic balance between three people where you can have duets and do solos and have three different points of view that can take the music in different directions. You can let one person go off and two people keep it together or sometimes it’s one person keeping it together. It’s usually two instruments that play notes and one that does percussion, so you can easily invent things and go with the flow. Having only three instruments also makes it easier to listen to each other. I’ve always gravitated towards trios.

When you toured with this group around 1986, what were the shows like? 

It was a very responsive time in music where people were very openminded and into those kinds of things. A lot of people who had been into their own type of music started to branch out and listen to other stuff, particularly in Europe. We had very mixed audiences. I was the fusion guy and Ginger was the classic rock guy and Bernie was the funk guy, so we got all of those audiences together. We had good turnouts and eager crowds.

What are your fondest memories of playing with those two? 

It is a generational thing. They are a generation before me, coming up in the ’60s and playing with all of those legendary groups. At that time there was an open mindedness that closed starting in the mid-’70s going into the ’80s. Everything became very structured and blocked off into certain genres. You were supposed to have a specific identity and some things were right and some things were wrong, and that escalated to a level where people were not inventing anymore. Everybody is looking backwards and everything is retro. The exploratory urge that Bernie and Ginger had, which was in that generation of musicians, that’s what I miss. That’s what’s hard to achieve today. To find people who are so free of their identity that they can just see the music and know it’s not about them, it is about the music itself.

If you could go back now and give your 20-year-old self a piece of advice, what would it be?

I think it would have been to record much more and truly capture those moments. It happened and I was grateful to be part of it, but if I had more sense I could’ve made more out of it. It was all in the moment though, and it came and went, so I’m okay with it. I do miss the time before everything was recorded on phones and marketed on social media. Performances were only for us and the 400 people in the crowd. It was all in the moment.

How would you say you’ve evolved and matured as a player since the time of this album?

That’s a hard one, but an interesting one. I’ve had moments when I’ve listened back to things I did a long time ago and it sounds like I’m trying to do the same thing now that I was doing back then. In many ways we develop and we get better and more complex. We learn more and we have more information and more ways of expressing it, but at the same time it seems like the 25-year-old me was already doing what I am trying to do, and doing it very fearlessly. Certain things are lost and certain things are improved. I can’t honestly say what is worse or better from then or now because it’s all expression. The greatest progress is that one becomes less self-important with age. When you’re 25 you want to go out and conquer the world and be the greatest and slay all the dragons. But then you realize you are one human being and there are eight billion others, and everybody has a value and an expression. We are all humans and what I do is what I do. I’ve lost my desire to judge and rank things. It’s all an expression and desire of humanity and passion.

For More: Click Here