Elliott Sharp // Eva Klesse Quartett // Francesco Bearzatti Tinissima 4tet

50 years ago, Martin Luther King, Jr. opened the Berliner Festwochen and dedicated a personal foreword to the first Berliner Jazztage. The Berlin Jazz Festival commemorates this event and envisions the consistently up-to-date message of the civil rights activist with a multi-layered festival project, created by the New Yorker multi-instrumentalist Elliott Sharp. His portfolio ranges from jazz and noise-improvisations to math rock, compositions for string quartets and chamber ensembles all the way to techno and blues. His oeuvre recurrently shows components of social criticism for which he can rely on the proven cooperation of poets and performers Tracie Morris and Eric Mingus.
Commissioned by Jazzfest Berlin 2014

ElliottSharp homepage

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She’s a drummer who thinks in the categories of a band. Eva Klesse, who is just 28 years old, accesses to jazz via subtle sound explorations and in interplay with her quartet. This musician from North Rhine-Westphalia studied in Leipzig, starting with medicine and eventually moving on to the subject she feels is her inner calling and central focus of her life: jazz. A seemingly effortless lightness infuses the music of this group, which the Berlin Jazz Festival is presenting as a new discovery. Eva Klesse knows how to spur on her fellow musicians with an unharnessed desire for musical expression, capturing new terrains and covering a whole range of musical moods – from quiet, tenderly arranged melancholic tones, to a fast-paced collective force.

EvaKlesse homepage

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The title of this programme can be taken literally: “Monk’n’Roll” samples from the tradition of Thelonious Monk, and with virtuosity and pleasure alike, whips up themes by the classic jazz legend and fuses them with rock and pop. For the Udine-born saxophonist Francesco Bearzatti, this project is not in the least about finding the lowest common denominator, but about an explosive and equally intelligent blend. With intuition, precision and fiendish pleasure, he pairs Monk’s “Bemsha Swing” with the disco classic “Good Times” by Chic, or “’Round Midnight” with the Police hit “Walking On the Moon”. What he fuses is not normally found together and the result is an indescribable listening pleasure.

“It’s a venture, a dream – made by four forty-somethings who grew up with rock and roll, but who then became devoted to jazz, to Monk.”
Francesco Bearzatti

FrancescoBearzatti homepage