Ditzner Sharp – Live at Enjoy Jazz 2024 (Vinyl)
Erwin Ditzner (dr, electronics)
Elliott Sharp (gt, electronics)
LP fixcel 26
Rel. 05/2025
fixcel records limited Photo Edition
CD with Print mounted on Hahnemühle Photo Rag
(from 30.5.2024)
Buy at the Jazzpages Jazzshop (from 25/05/30)
No Rules!
Just before they go on stage at the Alte Feuerwache in Mannheim on October 16, 2024, Erwin Ditzner takes his duo partner Elliott Sharp aside once more and asks him in a whisper: “Elliott, no rules?” The New York guitarist looks at the drummer from Ludwigshafen and says with complete conviction: “Yeah, no rules!” This moment before the concert of the two unconventional improvisation artists at the 26th Enjoy Jazz Festival shows, on the one hand, how focused they were on plunging into the adventure of truly free improvised music. On the other hand, this anecdote also illustrates the concept of Ditzner’s “Carte Blanche” concerts. After a performance at Enjoy Jazz 2008 in a trio with clarinetist Rudi Mahall and bassist Sebastian Gramss, it was the artistic director of Enjoy Jazz, Rainer Kern, who gave the drummer, who was born in Worms in 1960 and lives in Ludwigshafen, a “carte blanche” to invite musicians from all over to the festival every fall to perform an evening of freely improvised music live in front of an audience.
The idea of these “Carte Blanche” concerts can be described as celebrating the magical moment of the first encounter. Well-known improvisational artists have accepted Ditzner’s invitation so far: the Berlin saxophonist Silke Eberhard or the Berlin-based Japanese pianist Aki Takase, as well as the British saxophonist Tobias Delius, the Austrian pianist Philip Zoubek and, from the USA, the pianist Marilyn Crispell or the guitarist Jeff Parker, among others. They often came together in duos, sometimes formed trios, and occasionally there were quartets and larger lineups. The drummer had already known some of his guests beforehand and had played with one or the other before, but he got to know others only shortly before the joint performance.
Ditzner also already knew Elliott Sharp, who was born in Cleveland, Ohio in 1951. In 2015, he brought the guitarist to Mannheim for a “carte blanche” concert in a trio with Gramss. The three musicians presented themselves as stylistically and aesthetically broad-based, showed themselves to be eloquent in expression and phrasing, and repeatedly pushed the energy level of their performance to the limits of what was possible.
But the story of Ditzner and Sharp was not yet told to the end. The approximately 80 minutes that the two spent together on stage at the Alte Feuerwache in the fall of 2024 also show that. There they celebrated a freely improvised music, form and structure only emerged in their anticipatory interaction, they left each other space to formulate a musical idea and develop it with the other. They differentiated their improvisational art in such a way that even the smallest details came to radiate, but were also loud and energetic when the flow of the joint improvisation allowed it. Entirely trusting their own intuition, they morphed the sounds, using quiet interference noises from the digital construction kit or feedback from the electric guitar to often steer the music in new directions, only to then end up with a stable groove from the drums, over which a breakneck riff from the electric guitar was laid without further ado. They were fully focused on the task at hand, there were no breaks between pieces. Only at the end did Ditzner and Sharp pause for a brief moment before playing their encore after the applause. According to the dictionary, a palindrome is a “meaningful sequence of letters, words or verses that make sense when read forwards and backwards”. For their album “Ditzner | Sharp – Live at Enjoy Jazz Festival 2024”, the two musicians use palindromes as an extension of the creativity they have already shown in concert. The cover motif, with its blurred black-and-white photo and a piece of barbed wire in the middle, with which the motif is divided into two equal halves, is already a visually ironic refraction of the palindrome. While the names of the first and last pieces, “Anitram” = Martina and “Sukram” = Markus, can still be identified as palindromes to a certain extent, in the case of “Redivider” or “Rotavator” this is only apparent in the word image. For that too is a palindrome: showing the asymmetry of a work of art in the symmetry of its frame.
(Martin Laurentius, March 2025)
