Today is Jan Roder’s birthday, and to mark the occasion, I’d like to share a video from our early days—one that very few people have seen yet.
It captures us during our time in Hannover, not long after we had started making music together. At the time, Jan had just quit studying double bass at the conservatory there. He played quite differently back then—and looked quite different, too. And no, I don’t just mean because of the natural aging process.
This trio with Klaus Spencker was our second band together, following an earlier trio with saxophonist Christof Knoche.
The video was recorded in 1995 on my 27th birthday at the VVK in Hannover.
By then, I had already been living in Berlin for a year, and Jan was just about to move there himself, after a few visits where we played with some local musicians.
Jan and I have now been making music together for over thirty years. Just last year, we released a double album on Trouble In The East Records—Griener | Roder: Be Our Guest—a retrospective of our work from those three decades.
Jan is probably the musician I’ve performed with most often, and he’s also one of my oldest friends. Our time living together in various shared apartments in Berlin back in the nineties has long become the stuff of urban legend.
Happy birthday, dear Jan!
