LP fixcel 20 (CD)
Rel. 10/2020
Purchase LP directly from the artist via Erwin Ditzner’s website
Buy LP with original photography in the limited fixcel photo edition.
Chris Jarrett, p
Erwin Ditzner, dr
»When you listen to Ditzner and Jarrett, you immediately notice this peculiar uncompromising attitude: Abstraction to atonality, drastic instead of dramatic.«
(Volker Doberstein)
Sound
Linernotes (by Volker Doberstein)
Music is free. Once you allow it this freedom, music has no need to declare stylistic allegiances or fulfill genre-oriented expectations. In its most valuable and creative moments, it simply finds its own way. The present live recording represents a wonderful example of just this.
Erwin Ditzner is the bearer of the only „carte blanche,“ presented by the prestigious „Enjoy Jazz Festival“ of Germany’s Baden-Württemberg. With this, he is allowed to choose and present a new musical team every year. This is how, in 2019, the duo-concert on this recording took place. Erwin Ditzner is a versatile drummer and gifted with an intense natural musicianship. His playing unfolds through what he hears, but he listens to what is taking place both on the outside and inside. When both of these aspects come together, real rhythmic magic is made. Even in the most ecstatic moments, he searches for reduced and pointed musical statements. By doing this, he not only offers rhythmic patterns to his musical partners, but opens up whole spaces for them.
These qualities are hardly to be underestimated in a project like this one. Chris Jarrett has, in his musical life, trained and developed more stylistic threads than there are given names for. It takes some careful listening to understand that, far from being anything remotely arbitrary, his work is actually like an all-encompassing musical net. Jarrett has the rare quality never to have nailed himself down – his music is still open for the process of diffusion. Perhaps it was good luck that he was never able to study composition in his youth: he seems to have made up for this through decades of listening and performing, and achieved a depth and contextual abundance in which real life experiences are not disincluded: an inimitable meeting of the autonomous and the authentic. What strikes the listener immediately on hearing Ditzner and Jarrett is that the music is so uncompromising: more radical than dramatic and often abstract and atonal. The texture of the musical language develops out of the given idea and not the other way around. There are apparently few, if any, guidelines in this music. There is a core in it, but the action really takes place on its edges. In this way, the music not only changes continually, but – a wonderful paradox – mutates its own conditions. We experience a constant and comprehensive alteration. Seen as such, what we are listening to here is not only masterful, but it is perhaps the most natural form of music possible.
Info
Drummer Erwin Ditzner receives an annual “Carte Blanche” from Rainer Kern, the head of the Enjoy Jazz Festival. An evening on which he can choose his fellow musicians. In 2019 it was the pianist Chris Jarrett. The recording of this interaction can be heard on this LP, fixcel records 20.
Release: October 2020
Recorded on November, 13th, 2019 at Alte Feuerwache Mannheim at the Enjoy Jazz Festival
Recording: Thilo Klag / Mix: Matthias Dörsam / Mastering: Lopazz
Photography & Layout: Frank Schindelbeck
Support: Frank Kindler
| ditzner.de | chrisjarrett.de
