tickets:
regular: 14,- €uro
students, disabled persons: 7,- €uro
doors: 8.00 pm CET
concert starts:
approx. 8.30 pm CET
Sounds like this:
https://youtu.be/3iZpv9Cfdn4
A maze is a place where you get lost, while a labyrinth is a place where you find yourself. On his album Almost Natural, Cologne bassist Florian Herzog breaks through the narrow dividing wall between labyrinth and maze and creates a refuge where not only he and his fellow musicians, but also the listeners of the record can find and lose themselves at the same time....
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tickets:
regular: 14,- €uro
students, disabled persons: 7,- €uro
doors: 8.00 pm CET
concert starts:
approx. 8.30 pm CET
Sounds like this:
https://youtu.be/3iZpv9Cfdn4
A maze is a place where you get lost, while a labyrinth is a place where you find yourself. On his album Almost Natural, Cologne bassist Florian Herzog breaks through the narrow dividing wall between labyrinth and maze and creates a refuge where not only he and his fellow musicians, but also the listeners of the record can find and lose themselves at the same time.
Basically Almost Natural lives from brilliantly balanced contrasts. The hyperactive meets the relaxed, the binding meets the non-committal, the synthetic meets the organic, the abstract meets the accessible, the broken meets the continuously flowing, the groovy meets the avant-garde. Herzog explores all the nooks and crannies of his musical personality without ever losing sight of the epicenter. He is not afraid of extremes, but they are always defined by the common center. „When I write, I always go for these contrasts,“ the bassist holds. „Free improvisation is tremendously important to me. But for all the abstraction, I’m always looking for a core that makes the music accessible. That can be a melody or a groove that triggers a nod of the head, even if you might not have to understand one hundred percent what’s really going on when you listen to it. With the setlist of the album just as with the course of a live concert, I know that after five minutes of chaos you first need a few melodies or chords to relax. On a large scale and on a small scale.“
With full intention, Herzog misleads the ear already in the first two tracks. The opener Listening Integrity is a firework of abstraction and ferocity, while the second song Advanced Computer Music gently recalls the sonic aesthetic of fusion jazz without lacking structural complexity. Herzog continues to make extremely diverse offerings as if flying over an archipelago of islands with vastly different climatic conditions, geological formations and densities of population. And yet all these islets belong to one and the same group of islands. Herzog has deliberately placed these two songs, which could hardly be more opposite, at the beginning of the album, not only to delineate the spectrum of the songs, but also to generate a maximum level of attention through the positive shock of the aesthetic system change while listening.
Much sounds here like free jazz at first, but Herzog retains far too much control over the overall musical process for it to be truly genuine free jazz. With his colleagues Elias Stemeseder on piano and synthesizer, Sebastian Gille on saxophone and Leif Berger on drums, the bassist has three comrades-in-arms with whom he can not only explore every conceivable playing ground, but who can also – to stay with the above image – completely lose themselves individually and collectively in any situation, only to find themselves again just as quickly and intuitively. Which brings us to another contradiction: the permanent dualism between holding on and letting go. Herzog and his three fellow players share a symbiosis that can best be described by the album title almost natural. In blind agreement they rush off together, catch each other, penetrate each other, sometimes also separate themselves from each other, in order to immediately dissolve the demarcation lines they have created together. In the collective game, the center of impulse is constantly shifting. Florian Herzog has known drummer Leif Berger for the longest time. The two Cologne natives have formed a stable rhythm unit in a wide variety of formations for about ten years. Herzog emphasizes that they have grown alongside and with each other during this period, without either of them ever having played in the other’s band. Thus, with „Almost Natural,“ a long-held wish comes true. Herzog met the Austrian keyboardist Elias Stemeseder in New York. The two musicians were neighbors and never missed an opportunity to play together. Like Berger, Stemeseder is characterized by an almost limitless intuitive flexibility that allows him not only to react spontaneously to any context, but also to always anticipate and create. His sounds, especially on the synthesizer he uses in the origin of the word for explicit sound synthesis, are not least the binding agent that holds together the intentions of the three others. The partnership with saxophonist Sebastian Gille, known for his hussar rides, solidified during the Corona period. They met regularly together with Leif Berger and began to lay the foundation for the pieces that have now been completed on „Almost Natural“. Herzog himself acts here not only as a bassist and composer, but also as a post producer, who after the real-time sessions with a lot of tact lent a hand and gave the songs their final polish.
In the special qualities of this instrumentation, Florian Herzog summons the courage to make a decision that one encounters as rarely in jazz as in all other musical genres. The quartet defines itself less by its common intersection than by the individual contrasts of its fellow players. This results in an almost explosive tension, regardless of whether it is the more dynamic parts or the quieter phases. The four musicians can encounter each other anew in each piece from the difference of their respective positions. The interferences of access and perceptions allow an added value that goes far beyond what can be expected from the line-up saxophone-keys-bass-drums. The usual distribution of roles is consistently broken up and the parts are assembled in a new and always surprising way.
The dramaturgy of „Almost Natural“ is best described by the song title „Misleading Energy“. It is like an active volcano, whose chimneys break open here and there and spew boiling lava into the surrounding area, but on whose fertile slopes it is otherwise green and blooming. Reliable unpredictability – that’s what distinguishes this album above all others.
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