How do you become a trumpet player? Certainly easier if the instrument is always within reach. Like Nico Weber. His father is a trumpeter, not as a full-time job, but as an ambitious hobby musician who plays in many pop and rock bands. So Nico was tempted early on to try out the instrument that glittered so beautifully with gold. Was there never another option? “Yes, I really wanted to play drums,” he says. “All little children love to drum on something. I even took lessons. But in the end I stuck with the trumpet.”
Certainly not a bad decision. The 23-year-old from Munich is already considered a future great in the scene. The debut album “Ela”, which has just been released on the Swiss Unit label, with his Kwartett underlines this. The nine pieces, which were all written by himself, sound astonishingly mature. Starting with the minimalist, calm “Introduction”. About the fast, boppy “Anit Cipation” – the title sums up the pronounced spontaneous improvisational character of the piece in a very funny way -, the wonderfully melancholic-melodic title piece, played on the flugelhorn and with interesting twists, or the flashy, driven by powerful piano chords ” Why” to the solo vehicle “Boris on his Pentagonal Tricycle” and the two-part, very lyrical “Different Shades of a Dawn”.
The album, which will be presented on April 4th at a double release concert with Moritz Stahl in the Unterfahrt, shows: Nico Weber is not just a Sturm und Drang trumpeter focused on himself, he is completely rooted in tradition . “I grew more and more fond of it during my studies because I realized what it means to play jazz,” he says. “But of course I want to continue and expand it with my own means and sounds.” The scholarship from the Yehudi Menuhin “Live Music Now” Foundation fits in with this, as does his entire career to date. At 16 he started in the Bavarian youth brass band 3BA, a brass orchestra based on the British model, with which he won first prize as section leader a year later at the “Butlin’s Mineworkers Open BrassBand Championships” in Skegness, England.
In parallel to studying trumpet with Claus Reichstaller at the Jazz Institute of the Munich University of Music, he played in the state youth jazz orchestra and various big bands. He has been working part-time as a trumpet teacher since he was 19. A year later he founded his own jazz combo, das, with fellow students Jakob Jäger on bass, Leo Ebert on drums and Maxim Burtsev on piano Nico Weber Kwartett, with whom he was a finalist at the Kurt Maas Jazz Award last year. And he got firmly into the indie pop band Stray Colors a.
He has now completed his bachelor’s degree and last summer he completed his public final concert in the Unterfahrt. Now the perspective of the master’s degree should be broadened. Weber has applied in Leipzig, Berlin and for the cross-Scandinavian “Nordic Jazz Master”, “a direction in which I am strongly drawn,” as he says. After a semester abroad in Mongolia, it will be the first time you can really leave your comfortable Munich nest.
It probably won’t be an easy road. Basically, you have to admire any young person who decides to become a jazz musician. Weber could already see from his father that only a few people can make a living from music. “I was aware of this early on and at first I didn’t think that the trumpet could become my profession. But then the others were at school and I went on an orchestra trip for a week and had the time of my life. That was for me the moment of decision.” Nico Weber brings a lot with him so that he doesn’t have to regret it.
Nico Weber Kwartett: “Ela”, Unit Records 51 30, 2024