PETER EHWALD / STEFAN SCHULTZE – STAMP
PETER EHWALD tenor saxophone TOMASZ DĄBROWSKI trumpet STEFAN SCHULTZE piano ANDREAS LANG double bass MORITZ BAUMGÄRTNER drums „In 2019, Stefan and I were looking for music that was less complex and more focused on jazz improvisation,“ explains Ehwald. They invited bassist Andreas Lang, a long-time fixture in the saxophonist’s group Double Trouble and drummer Moritz Baumgärtner. „I met Tomasz [Dąbrowski] through Andreas, and Stefan and I heard him the same year at a solo concert in Bochum, where we performed with Tom Rainey. I think Tomasz has an incredible voice and I immediately heard the sound of the quintet in my head.“ „It is our homage to the sound of the quintet in jazz,“ says Schultze. „Ultimately, it was about not focusing too much on pitch/rhythm/harmonies etc., but on our idea of what the sound of the jazz quintet means to us, explains Schultze. “We wanted to translate a kind of nostalgia/meaning from an earlier time into our sound language and into the present.“ The quintet recorded the album at Jazzschmiede, a club in Düsseldorf, and the group plays with a fiery spark. By sharing their potent ideas, Ehwald and Schultze have produced something greater than the sum of its parts. „Since Peter and I both compose and constantly exchange ideas about music, but nevertheless write completely different compositions, an exciting dialectic arises between our compositions or also through each other’s comments. STAMP is a project that translates this very direct way of making music into our musical lives. It’s really about the group and about the feeling of looking forward to spending time together on stage, but also getting together and talking about music and life. “ Peter Margasak DE Die Quintett-Besetzung um Peter Ehwald und Stefan Schultze mit Ihrer tradierten Form Tenorsaxophon, Trompete plus Klaviertrio ist eine Liebes-Erklärung an den Jazz und kreiert gleichzeitig einen Kontext der Aufforderung ist, sich neu zu positionieren. Als Grundsatz für das Quintett STAMP steht die Idee, Musik zu entwickeln, die in einem begrenzten Rahmen maximal viel Platz für die Ausgestaltung zulassen. Keine Überinformation – die Kompositionen formulieren die wichtigsten Bedingungen, um improvisatorische Momente des Ensembles zu kreieren – direkt und emotional. Zwei ganz unterschiedliche aufregende Solisten (der Trompeter Tomasz Dąbrowski aus Malmö der Saxophonist Peter Ehwald aus Berlin) setzen kontrapunktische Akzente. Das Klaviertrio mit dem Wahlberner Stefan Schultze und den Berlinern Andreas Lang (b) und Moritz Baumgärtner (dr) füllt und interpretiert die Räume dieser Musik überraschend und grandios. „Im Grunde genommen geht es nicht um Tonhöhen, Rhythmen oder Harmonien, sondern darum, was der Jazz-Quintett Sound für uns bedeutet. Wir wollten eine Art Nostalgie, oder die Bedeutung einer früheren Zeit in unsere Klangsprache und in das Hier und Jetzt übersetzen.“ erklärt Schultze. ENGLISH – LONG TEXT: Since they first began playing music together back in 2001, when they were both students in Cologne, saxophonist Peter Ehwald and pianist Stefan Schultze have demonstrated a commitment to exploration. Over the last two decades or so they’ve experimented with shifting instrumental formats and stylistic concerns, as if they were silently competing to absorb a greater variety of traditions and approaches. The pianist leads a big band with an almost dizzying Ferris wheel of conceits shuffling between each tune, he’s forged a rigorous solo practice marked by inventive piano preparations, and he also fronts an equally versatile sextet that nonchalantly toggles between moody post-bop and herky-jerk complexity. Likewise, Ehwald has thrived in new settings, whether leading the quartet Double Trouble centered by a pair of double bassists, unspooling lithe sax lines within a matrix of Korean percussion played by the duo Ensemble ~su, or writing ambitious art-songs in his project Septuor de Grand Matin. Over the years they’ve each played in one another’s groups, but after forming an improvising trio with the sublime American drummer Tom Rainey things opened up further. Playing with him opened them both up, essentially changing the way they approach their music. „Playing with Tom, there is no safety net, no seat belt, or fixed roles of instruments,“ says Ehwald. „It is super inspiring to see how Tom can very quickly strip a piece of music to its core and then explore it from any angle possible. Working on it, making it different every time, with the prospect of making it better.“ Indeed, the trio’s two albums for jazzwerkstatt are marvels of concision and invention, rigorous collective investigation marked by uncommon communication. Although it might seem like a paradox, discovering this new sense of freedom and chance-taking with Rainey allowed Ehwald and Schultze to rediscover the fundamental approach to playing jazz that first riveted them as kids. „In 2019, Stefan and I were looking for music that was less complex and more focused on jazz improvisation,“ explains Ehwald. They invited bassist Andreas Lang, a long-time fixture in the saxophonist’s group Double Trouble and drummer Moritz Baumgärtner. „I met Tomasz [Dąbrowski] through Andreas, and Stefan and I heard him the same year at a solo concert in Bochum, where we performed with Tom Rainey. I think Tomasz has an incredible voice and I immediately heard the sound of the quintet in my head.“ „It is our homage to the sound of the quintet in jazz,“ says Schultze, noting that when the band was initially formed Ehwald aimed to impose a series of limitations and parameters a la the Danish filmmaking movement Dogma 95. In the end, however, they chose to celebrate the format in all of its splendor. „Ultimately, it was about not focusing too much on pitch/rhythm/harmonies etc., but on our idea of what the sound of the jazz quintet means to us,“ explains Schultze. „We wanted to translate a kind of nostalgia/meaning from an earlier time into our sound language and into the present.“ Clearly, the quintet did not eschew their ambitions and simply churn out an old-school post-bop album. For both Ehwald and Schultze the album offers the most complete portrait of their collective interests and practices. The first piece Ehwald wrote for the band is the opening track ‚No One‘, which can’t help but conjure the tightrope dynamics and smoldering intensity of the second Miles Davis Quintet with Wayne Shorter. While the form and attack are warmly familiar, the real treat is the elastic group dynamic, as the feather stroke tenor lines of Ehwald and the muscular phrases of Dąbrowski are persistently cajoled and caressed by the rhythm section, which is perpetually adjusting, responding, and prodding within itself. But Schultze’s thrillingly episodic ‚Return to Sender‘ silences any suggestions that STAMP is an exercise in nostalgia or bald homage. In some ways the piece pulls together numerous threads, beginning with deft chamber-like interplay organized around a dancing, pointillistic framework that accrues pace and complexity until a glorious, swinging release. When the jagged rhythmic scheme returns, it undergirds and pushes along a trumpet solo by Dąbrowski that’s somehow brash in its meticulous elucidation. After Lang plays a wonderfully febrile, tightly coiled duet with Baumgärtner, the pianist kicks in, awash in stop-start gyrations until the groove switches into a loping swing to set the stage for the saxophonist, tapping into some late Coltrane oratory. The mixture of post-bop form, free playing, and heightened listening captures the band at its best. Here Schultze and Ehwald draw on their technique and knowledge, but all in service to a cogent ensemble sound. The extended techniques or open passages seep out of the core sound organically rather than appearing as glib accents or self-conscious pastiche. Even when the conceptual underpinning is somewhat arcane—Schultze says, „The song is based around a line derived from a 39/16th pattern which gets recalibrated in different ways throughout the song“—the band creates a sound that’s pure pleasure. There’s a sense of suspended animation on the pianist’s mysterious ‚Oumuamua‘, with the rhythm section kind of levitating on fluttering, interactive gestures while the two horn players improvise at low volume, slaloming between each other exquisite tenderness and empathy. Schultze says, „I wanted the music to sound like a slow moving three-dimensional object. There is a lot of composed vagueness in the structure of the song where melodies slowly become chords and oscillate against constant changes of the rhythmic subdivision of a very slow pattern.“ On the other hand, Ehwald’s ‚How High‘ embraces a timeless jazz convention in using the changes of a standard— ‚How High the Moon‘ —for a new tune, saluting the way his heroes Charlie Parker and John Coltrane did the same with their respective compositions ‚Ornithology‘ and ‚Satellite‘. STAMP rejects any either/or proposition about drawing from the past. Rather, the quintet welcomes the full diapason of jazz history. The band has coalesced over a couple of concentrated spurts of touring, including brief windows of possibility when the pandemic was frequently shutting down performance opportunities. The quintet recorded the album at Jazzschmiede, a club in Düsseldorf, during one such period, with some material cut without an audience during the day, with the rest recorded during the evening gig. In both cases the group plays with a fiery spark. By sharing their potent ideas, Ehwald and Schultze have produced something greater than the sum of its parts. „Since Peter and I both compose and constantly exchange ideas about music, but nevertheless write completely different compositions, an exciting dialectic arises between our compositions or also through each other’s comments. This makes it lively for me to create a framework for a group with Peter together.“ Schultze and Ehwald both lived and worked in Berlin since 2007—following a couple of years spent in New York City—but the former moved to Bern, Switzerland in 2020 for a teaching gig, so we should be grateful that they’ve managed to keep their partnership alive despite the geographical distance. Schultze says, „STAMP is a project that translates this very direct way of making music into our musical lives. It’s really about the group and about the feeling of looking forward to spending time together on stage, but also getting together and talking about music and life.“ Peter Margasak / Berlin, December 2022