Release Date: 09 March 2018
Label: Between The Lines
Packaging Type: Jewel Case
No of Units: 1
Barcode: 608917124422
Genres: Jazz Contemporary
Description
Idee manu's second album "Oktopus" is inspired by the music of Boris Blacher.
Boris Blacher (1903-75) studied architecture and maths, then music, in Berlin and made ends meet composing commissions and accompanying silent film on the piano. After World War II, he became professor of composition, then head of Berlins Hochschule für Musik and was considered one of the most versatile personalities in new music in Germany. Influenced by Schoenberg, Hindemith and Milhaud, the worldly Blacher retained profound musical wit and artistic openness, thus safeguarding his work from the hermeticism that makes much of the music of his contemporaries accessible for specialists only.
"Three years ago, Boris Blacher's piano music was a new discovery for me," says Swiss pianist and composer Manuela Keller. "Its lean style, its unconventional rhythm and barren beauty appealed to me immediately and inspired me to dedicate the second Idée manu CD to him. He left a large oeuvre comprising almost all musical genres and also had an interest in jazz all his life. He developed a 'system of variable metres' to break musical form and rhythmic symmetry with numerous, arithmetically structured metre changes. 'Krebs', 'Sberk', 'Dugong' and 'Prélude 16' are typical examples of this technique." Those are four out of 16 compositions that Manuela Keller got her teeth into, both as a soloist and in a quartet with trombone player Nick Gutersohn, bass guitarist Jan Schlegel and drummer Marco Käppeli. Three are written by Keller, the other ten are adaptations, some more subtle, others more extensive, of models from Blacher's late 24 Préludes for piano, his piano cycle Ornamente and his Second Sonatina.
Tracklisting
Ralph Alessi & Ravi Coltrane
Philipp Gerschlauer, Gebhard Ullmann
Koj/Louis Sclavis
Peter Van Huffel's Gorilla Mask
Gebhard Ullmann Basement Research
Nils Wogram
Yedid Yitzhak
Beady Beast, Christy Doran & Franz Hellmuller
Nigel Price Organ Trio
Conrad Herwig
Norma Winstone & Kit Downes
Oded Tzur
Su Rossy Girod, Nat Su, Jorge Rossy
Jonathan Salvi Arugula Sextet
Bob Baldwin
Steven Nichols
