Philip Zoubek / Sebastian Gramss / Erwin Ditzner – Ditzners carte blanche Live at Enjoy Jazz Festival 2021
Philip Zoubek (keys, electronics)
Sebastian Gramss (b)
Erwin Ditzner (dr, electronics)
Vinyl fixcel 24
Rel. 1/2024
Vinyl / CD in cardboard sleeve
Liner Notes by Jan Künemund
waves.
I first heard this music on a ferry crossing from Naples to the Aeolian Islands. The sea was agitated, the light glistening, my own standpoint restless. That this perceptual framework felt immediately very right had less to do with the tired travel trope or the colliding sensual elements, but rather with the idea of how the seemingly contrary, challenging, confusing interplay of wind, waves, light, improvising machine and destabilized perception could still have something to do with a structure of balance in which all this participates.
This is not the first time that Erwin Ditzner and Sebastian Gramss have invited someone who plays a keyboard instrument to join them for a free improvisation. The piano trio has a long tradition in jazz, it is a classic format, so to speak, which continues to amaze me. an instrument as complete as the piano, whose lower range can replace the bass, whose percussive qualities can replace the drums, and yet it sounds so different, does not blend in, it stands alone especially when you have expanded the sound palette as much as Philip Zoubek, who prepares it, expands it to include a synthesizer, and can switch fluidly between concrete music, interlocked grooves, Bley-like coolness and late-romantic ecstasy. What he offers here does not merge, despite the percussive and manipulated answers of the bass, despite Ditzner’s very own treatment of material, whose sounds often spontaneously resemble the crackling and chirping of primitive synthesizers. The three of them could merge into one another, play around, obscure their sources, form a uniform whole but: nothing is uniform here, they never fall together into a straight groove, a played joke, a stringent narrative. In very different ways, they attack the surface tension of the situation from three sides, setting up disturbances, trusting that the balance will be restored elsewhere, usually quite quickly A wave is a disturbance that regains itself. It can be short or long, it can whip up foam in the water, form mountains and valleys, roll evenly, or rebound.
solid ground, it is not understandable. If you are hanging inside, even less so, but then you get the desire to feel your own seemingly chaotic movement, which has to constantly react to it. Wasn’t that a melody just now? Didn’t my body just feel a groove? Did a metal sheet just creak in the back left, or was there an electrical discharge right in front of me
The best way to listen to free jazz improvisation is not in an armchair, but from within an audience that moves in different ways (in the second piece, a bottle falls over at the beginning). Sure, you’ve now put on the record, sat down in an armchair and are reading the text to it, that’s a contradiction, sorry – but you can imagine things or use volume and stereo. And be grateful that Fixcel documents these carte blanche performances by Erwin Ditzner and Sebastian Gramss so transparently and immersively.
I could write about maelstroms, about safe and unsafe waters, about harbor entrances and sunsets and lulls and moored final moments (you can hear it all), but my memory swirls into listening again that my ferry ride was canceled due to strong winds the two days before. It all came together precariously at that moment, as the music seized me, tossed me around, lapped at me: that the engine was even started, that the waves were just deep enough, that the light was enough and I hadn’t missed the departure. And that I had no other music on my phone. Losing your balance in many whirlpools. That. is. live.
Info
Recorded on October 30, 2021 at the Alte Feuerwache Mannheim, Enjoy Jazz Festival
Live-Recording: Thilo Klag / Mix: Robert Nacken / Mastering: Lopazz
Liner Notes: Jan Künemund, Photography, Graphic & Layout: Frank Schindelbeck
Supported by emtechnik – many thanks to Michael Meier (em-technik.de)
“Every appearance by Erwin Ditzner at Enjoy Jazz is like walking a tightrope without a safety net.All of the Ludwigshafen-based drummer’s ‘carte blanche’ concerts are improvised entirely freely, without much discussion beforehand. Time and again, however, listeners are amazed to see how forms and structures develop miraculously from pure intuition. This was also the case in 2021, when Ditzner performed at the Alte Feuerwache Mannheim with bassist Sebastian Gramss and pianist Philip Zoubek. (…) A lot happens on this wonderful record.” (Georg Spindler)
