Niggli

Andreas Schaerer & Lucas Niggli - Arcanum (2014) {Intakt CD 232}
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© 2014 Intakt Records | Intakt CD 232
Jazz / Experimental / Free Improvisation

Just vocals and drums – that’s the line-up of the dream team of Andreas Schaerer and Lucas Niggli. Outstanding virtuosity and enormous creativity combined with the intuition of sleepwalkers, produces an astonishing sound universe full of surprises. The imagination and ability of the two musicians to communicate and react is key to their free improvisations, which nevertheless are very precise. The album was recorded in the legendary “Loft” club in Cologne and is a mixture of live and studio recordings. The result is music played on the first instruments of mankind – voice and drum – which is opulent and impulsive, direct and delicate.

Alchemia Garden: the album’s wonderful title, creates an enchanting, ambiguous effect. Lucas Niggli relates the organic, biological and growing, which develops on its own and is cultivated and maintained in the form of the garden, to the metamorphosis of material, the scientific search for something unknown which historically has been seen to generate something new.

Plangliedli, Lanzigliedli, Herbstliedli, Heiwehliedli: dialect texts and cozy sounds in the art song? This is more than a beautiful dream. The singer Sybille Diethelm and the pianist Fabienne Romer present precious, imaginative, poetic and humorous settings of poems by the dialect poet Meinrad Lienert (1865-1933). And with him it's a bit like with Mozart: you like his poems if you only hear them once without knowing exactly why. And if you deal with them more extensively, it can happen that you almost "git" with joy because they are so charming and eloquent and so full of fine details.

The new compilation of the popular Magic Moments series, curated by ACT founder and producer Siggi Loch. 16 tracks, 67 minutes of the best jazz infotainment with well-known ACT stars, exciting newcomers and new discoveries.

After his gargantuan orchestral work “The Big Wig” and the improvisational fireworks of “Out of Land” (with Emile Parisien, Vincent Peirani and Michael Wollny) Andreas Schaerer has now immersed himself in a new sound-world. “A Novel Of Anomaly” presents eleven short stories, offering opportunities do delve into more intimate and pared-down vocal textures. Music involves so many levels of communication: verbal, audiovisual, emotional, even body language. In jazz, the spontaneity of improvisation ramps up the suspense and the excitement. And yet in the best situations, instant osmosis and mutual trust can inexplicably kick in.

Susanne Abbuehl startled listeners in 2001 with her debut release, April, in which she took on the poems of e.e. cummings, and created lyrics for a Carla Bley composition. A studied and original vocalist – she worked with Jeanne Lee – she is also a solid composer. Her aesthetic and restrained approach lend themselves easily to Manfred Eicher's production M.O. On Compass, Abbuehl and her band, which features the wonderful clarinetist Christoph May, dig deep into the words of James Joyce, William Carlos Williams, and the music of Sun Ra and Chick Corea. The project is once more refined and mannered yet utterly ambitious beginning with her original composition "Bathyal."

Presenting the 11th edition of ACT's popular Magic Moments series. This CD presents sixty-seven minutes of the best of current jazz. Thoughtful moments sit alongside pure joy and entertainment. With Michael Wollny, David Helbock, Vincent Peirani, Iiro Rantala, Joachim Kühn New Trio, Ida Sand, Lars Danielsson & Paolo Fresu et al.