Gentle Giants

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Gentle Giants
Slowfox studio album: Sebastian Gramss , Hayden Chisholm and Philip Zoubek

Publication
(s)

2017

Label (s) Traumton Records

Format (s)

CD

Genre (s)

jazz

Title (number)

15th

occupation

production

Sebastian Gramss, Ana Lakčević ( SWR 2 )

Location (s)

Schlossbergsaal of the SWR studio in Freiburg im Breisgau

chronology
The Wood
2014 		Gentle Giants -

Gentle Giants is an album by the Slowfox trio , consisting of Hayden Chisholm on alto saxophone, Philip Zoubek on piano and Sebastian Gramss on double bass. The recordings were made from September 12 to 14, 2016 in the Schlossbergsaal of the SWR studio in Freiburg; the album, co-produced by Südwestrundfunk , was released on Traumton Records on May 5, 2017.

background

After The Wood (Jazzwerkstatt 2014), Gentle Giants is the second album by the trio founded in 2013, whose musicians had previously worked together in numerous projects and formations (including in the Cologne Multiple Joy (ce) Orchestra ).

The individual titles of the album - read individually - make no sense, but strung together a sentence which, according to Sebastian Gramss , is attributed to Friedrich Nietzsche (although his authorship is not certain): And those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music (German: if you do n't hear the music, you think the dancers are insane ).

Sebastian Gramss 2017
Hayden Chisholm at Michael Rüsenberg's jazzcity.de festival on January 17, 2014 in the Loft (Cologne)

Track list

  • Slowfox: Gentle Giants (Traumton Records # 4645)
  1. And Those 4:16
  2. Who Were 4:16
  3. Seen Dancing 6:28
  4. Were 2:08
  5. Thought 4:18
  6. To Be 4:01
  7. Insane 4:03
  8. By 2:29
  9. Those 3:18 (Grams / Zoubek)
  10. Who 2:00
  11. Could 3:48
  12. Not 3:29
  13. Hear 3:39
  14. The 3:10
  15. Music 3:28

Unless otherwise stated, all compositions are by Sebastian Gramss.

reception

The albums received consistently positive reviews; "The Trio Slowfox lives from the musical sound language of the German double bass player Sebastian Gramss, which is neither intrusive nor vocal, but simply puts the soul-caressing reserve from the background to the front," said the jazz magazine Jazzthetik about the music of Slowfox.

After a concert in May 2017 at which the album was presented, Frank Schindelbeck wrote, “Three individual experts bundle their creative heads in this formation and create an extraordinarily dense trio music that is as elegant as it is highly complex. "Advanced Easy Listening " is a self-description that comes across as ironic as it is underground. In fact, many of the compositions by Sebastian Gramss on the new CD "Gentle Giants" are catchy and Chisholm's light-handed, airy way of playing does its part to make the music inviting to hear - on the one hand. On the other hand, you only have to immerse yourself in the music for a few moments to enjoy the intricacies, the abysses - which are prepared with a prepared piano and nervous bass lines - from which Chisholms Alt flutters out like a wild swallow in the evening sky ”.

Michael Rüsenberg praised Gentle Giants as a contender for the title “Album of the Year 2017, Jazz from Germany”. "Neo Cool Jazz , as it essentially, but not exclusively, comes from Hayden Chisholm, is celebrating a festival here, supplemented by influences from minimal music and extremely subtle electronic timbres." So Gentle Giants is "a festival of melody ." The title of the album reflects “the mesh of small lines, tonal shades and repetition forms, right down to a music box aesthetic - 'little giants'.” The third track (“Seen Dancing”) is “a dream made from these ingredients . It begins with a minimal pattern of the staccato double bass, the tone color is so easily transformed that you can barely perceive it. The piano sits on top, the alto sax follows, the ductus remains dance-mechanical, falls into the percussive , noises from piano and double bass in the upper registers . The flackerende pulse persists, contrasts of light floating electronic sound, the thematic material of piano and alto sax is not at all times Chick Corea -fern. "

For Rüsenberg it is “a surprise” that Philip Zoubek, with such a rhythmic pianist, insists on convention. "You hear z. As the small wooden knocker cutlery with which he in track 6 ( 'to be') the other two, rubato ensnared playing instruments - and then after one and a half minutes, you do not summarizes, in a Blues - Groove below. The graceful melody also adorns this cloak. And that is - besides all the chamber music mastery - the most striking thing about this production: German jazz has rarely shown such melodic magic, it is downright melody- obsessed. And don't slip on this ice. "

According to Frank Bender, the trio is roaming "a terrain that is occasionally reminiscent of an extracted version of Bill Bruford 's Earthworks or the work of Jan Garbarek ". “In this context, the complete renunciation of percussion instruments does not appear to be a disadvantage, but rather condenses the essence of the vibrations into a web that was created by musically enthusiastic anarchists and spiritual avant-gardists, as compositional formalisms were at least partially dispensed with in order to stimulate the senses of the To open up the essence of harmony to the recipient. Thus, without any exaggeration, this album can be described as a very successful mixture of shimmering compositional threads that are filigree spun in many directions and free improvisations that surf on these threads and have a lot of joy in them. "

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c d Michael Rüsenberg: CD DVD Reviews. Jazzcity, July 24, 2017, accessed November 16, 2018 (dr).
  2. ↑ Event information at Palatia Jazz
  3. ↑ Frank Schindelback: SLOWFOX - Jazz in Mannheim with Sebastian Gramss, Hayden Chisholm and Philip Zoubek. May 17, 2017. Retrieved November 16, 2018 .
  4. ↑ Frank Bender: Sebastian Grams Slowfox - Gentle Giants. Supervised Proggen, April 17, 2017, accessed November 16, 2018 .