Peter Bolte / Pablo Held Trio

Peter Bolte

Peter Bolte is considered an outstanding soloist on the alto sax. Less well-known are his electronica-projects that aspire to reconcile the norms of acoustical and electronic sound production in the sense of a organic musical language. After all, the issue is to bring the programmed calculability of electronics into a context with the spontaneous impulse and the physical expansion of the sound generated in real-time in a way that evokes sensory reactions in the listener.

In his duo with Jim Campbell, Bolte succeeds in fusing these two ways of thinking and working. Bolte, who is active in the NDR Big Band, indulges in the vastness and intimacy of the duo-context. Barren, plane soundscapes with flute and saxophone raising above like birdcalls leave space for individual associations.

Pablo Held Trio

When it comes to counting the Pablo Held Trio’s qualities, critics do not cut down on superlatives. There is talk of “the shooting star among young jazz pianists”, of “an ideal combination of improvisational imagination and musical economy” and of “one of the most exciting young groups of German jazz”. With good reason, for pianist Pablo Held, bassist Robert Landfermann and drummer Jonas Burgwinkel are more than a just a trio. They form one of the few symbiotic units in the piano trio’s more recent history. The trinity's intentions flow together in one common stream, the course and density of which time and again is full of surprises.

Pablo Held combines the tranquillity of the routinier, at home at nearly every major European jazz festival, with the ravenous appetite of a man in his mid-twenties, wanting to experience jazz from every imaginable perspective. In each piece the romanticist as well as the rationalist mark out their terrain.

Peter Bolte

Peter Bolte alto sax, flutes
Jim Campbell electronics

Pablo Held Trio

Pablo Held piano
Robert Landfermann bass
Jonas Burgwinkel drums