The line-up resembles an uprising in the bass and rhythm sections. The melody instruments typical of jazz bands are missing; instead, the focus here is on those that can usually be heard in the background. Samuel Blaser on the trombone takes care of the melodic component, proving the tonal and creative possibilities of the instrument. Heiri Känzig acts as a counterpart on the double bass. By touching rather than savoring the function of the basic tone generator, it elicits an orchestral variety from the bass.
Friday evening in the Alten Speicher, jazz festival in Ebersberg in front of a half-full hall. The trio around drummer Daniel Humair, trombonist Samuel Blaser and bassist Heiri Känzig plays with pianist Emil Spányi. And the audience goes with them, some shouting out loud with enthusiasm.
As band leader, Daniel Humair coordinates from percussion: the rebellious grand seigneur can look back on 83 years of life experience. The formation, which until now has only consisted of Swiss musicians, is supplemented by Emil Spányi, a Hungarian modern jazz artist with a stupendous technique who beats all the clichés of the jazz piano. Musicians from four different decades and lines of tradition stand on the stage and create lively, cross-generational communication.
Dense clusters of sound and multi-layered soundscapes dominate the musical image of the evening. It is music far removed from the traditional and even further from the commercial sector of jazz, but the artists accompany those listeners who want to open up to the sometimes sensational new sounds into a world of adventure. Their description escapes the usual formulations. The music exudes a certain synaesthesia, plays with colors and abstract forms, lets them run, merge and form new structures.
Unused and alive, each piece resembles a journey through fantastic imaginations, created by four perfectly coordinated geniuses in apparently supernatural, non-verbal communication. This bears witness to immense rehearsal work on the one hand and to a maximum of synchronized feeling and breathing on the other. Incidentally, the entire course of the evening also forms a superordinate form, namely towards the end the structures become more defined and understandable, the texture lighter.
The focus is on band leader Daniel Humair, whose thoroughly heard playing takes your breath away. He knows the sound of every point on his instruments and uses it for a meticulously precise design. He does not do this in a cerebral way only for the initiated audience, but also succeeds in conveying this to the listeners who have little or no idea about the drums. The sticks, which appear weightless in Humair’s hands, become feelers that enable him to come into direct contact with the material below. Above all, the multi-layered sound of his cymbals makes you sit up and take notice.
In view of the line-up, Heiri Känzig treats his bass partly as a melodic instrument, and also fills the harmonic basis himself, in short: he serves various functions in parallel. He has a keen sense of counterpoint treatment of the sound levels that he knows how to bring into communication with one another.
As far as Emil Spányi is concerned, his technical perfection is impressive, especially in the rhythmic component. Even the wildest runs and tone repetitions come out razor-sharp with a machine-like evenness, so that it is sometimes he who sets the pulse, which enables Humair to create more freely. With ornate garlands and repetition figures, Spányi creates volume, but also uses deliberate pauses and minimalist, sometimes one-handed motifs to classify the effect and ensure the greatest possible variety.
In the middle of the action: Samuel Blaser, who takes up all of the different kinds of inspirations around him and interacts with them, while also being able to fall back on a dynamic multilayeredness, which is why one likes to do without other melodic instruments. Blaser also uses the height of the funnel for acoustic variety and can also move in the accompanying position by using the damper.
Taken together, these individual impressions unfold in a voluminous, complex and versatile changeable soundscape, which is characterized by having fun making music and experiencing the moment.