Arne Jansen

Various Artists - Magic Moments 14 "In The Spirit Of Jazz"CD / digital"More than any other art form, music touches people directly," is ACT founder Siggi Loch's credo. For nearly 30 years, the core of what the label does has been to find and to promote the artists who can inspire the mind, reach the heart and touch the soul, and who do so in ways that have a lasting impact. Perhaps this has never been more important than now in the time of the pandemic, when culture has been silenced, when people have felt emotionally isolated and – far too often – the only “reality” has been virtual. With sixteen tracks from the current ACT release schedule, "Magic Moments 14" gathers together all of the power of "Music in the Spirit of Jazz", this world language beyond words which is understandable to everyone. It not only brings people together, it also moves and inspires them. ACT’s main mission is in the absolute foreground on this album: to be a discovery label. ACT’s main focus has always been on European jazz, to document this art form growing and developing, to show it reflecting on its own musical traditions, linking them back to jazz’s American roots and thereby opening up new paths. So, in that spirit, "Magic Moments 14" begins with a "Canzon del fuego fatuo" from the remarkable young Spanish pianist Daniel Garcia. Here is a fascinating new voice from Spanish jazz, taking up the music of his homeland in a refreshingly new way. We also mark here the ACT debut of mesmerising Austrian actor Birgit Minichmayr. Here is a voice and a personality with charismatic presence, delivering a Shakespeare Sonnet in the grand manner, together with Quadro Nuevo’s versatile world music team and the early jazz specialist Bernd Lhotzky. Other examples of new shining stars in the European musical firmament are the French-Algerian cellist and singer Nesrine and Austrian pianist David Helbock’s new trio. This focus on new and recent arrivals at the label does not mean neglecting the artists who have been with ACT since the beginning and who have made it the leading label for Swedish jazz: trombonist Nils Landgren contributes a new humdinger from his Funk Unit, a band which has been giving soul jazz a European face for over twenty-five years. Bassist/composer Lars Danielsson again celebrates the combination of classical music, jazz and Nordic sound with "Cloudland" from his new Liberetto album. Ida Sand conti-nues the tradition of Scandinavian singers who enrich the world's songbook with their pop "in the spirit of jazz". And for the final track, Jan Lundgren and Lars Danielsson, toge-ther with Emile Parisien, the French musician who has single-handedly redefined the soprano saxophone, show us Euro-pean art music with a Swedish accent at its most communicative and inspired. Last but not least, ACT was one of the first important labels to promote contemporary German jazz. There are more German artists on "Magic Moments 14" than ever before, demonstrating this important strand: violinist Florian Willeitner from Passau; guitarist Philipp Schiepek who has made a meteoric rise in the South German scene; the feisty attitude of KUU! led by singer Jelena Kuljic – like Minichmayr also primarily known for her acting and stagecraft; the Jazzrausch Bigband, whose techno jazz is attracting attention worldwide; and two rising stars who are currently harvesting all of the major awards, Johanna Summer and Vincent Meissner.Summer and Meissner - like Garcia, Lundgren and Helbock - also stand for the special place ACT has always found for the best pianists in Europe. Thus it is two German pianists of major international significance who complete the offering on "Magic Moments 14": 77-year-old Joachim Kühn is still utterly driven and a major force; his heir apparent Michael Wollny can also be heard here in his new all-star quartet with Emile Parisien, Tim Lefebvre and Christian Lillinger. The drummer was a multiple award-winner at the new German Jazz Prize, including one for KUU!. "Magic Moments 14" is a quintessence of the many directions which genre-crossing, innovative jazz is currently taking. These difficult times need remedies that are both energising and emotionally affecting: here are musicians who unfailingly show us the value and importance of trust and dialogue.Credits: Compilation by Siggi Loch Mastered by Klaus Scheuermann

David Helbock’s fine musicianship goes hand in hand with a remarkable ability to communicate on several levels. As British writer Peter Bacon has written, there is “much to intrigue the mind, much to warm the heart and much to tickle the funny bone.” German critic Roland Spiegel has elegantly described his music as “never cerebral, but capti-vating both the head and the body....” For his new album the Austrian-born pianist brings those strengths and that ability to engage and appeal to audiences into a new and different venture. “It was my wish to cool things down a bit,” he explains. He has formed a new trio with guitarist Arne Jansen and trumpeter Sebastian Studnitzky, and it is clear when he talks about it how far he has already moved on since his previous group: “In the Random Control Trio we had a lot of instruments on the stage, there was a lot of changing from one instrument to another… and a lot of notes.” And the new group? “It is more about emotions. And emotions are the most important thing in music.” This trio has are other differences from his previous groups: in the past, his bands have been made up of musicians from his native Austria. But he has now been living in Berlin for five years, and “The New Cool” presents his first group formed with players who have also adopted Berlin as their home city. With Arne Jansen, originally from Kiel, what appeals to Helbock is that “he is such an unselfish player, very centred and very calm – and subtle too. With him it’s all about the music.” Studnitzky is originally from the Black Forest, and Helbock likes “his style of playing with that very airy sound” and the fact the range of timbres and moods he creates with just one effects device. And how does it work in the trio? “All three of us are melody players, but we are all capable of holding back and giving space to the others.” It would be wrong, however, to see the elegaic feel of much of this album as a response to the pandemic. Helbock and producer Siggi Loch were having “a productive and fruitful discussion” about these ideas a full year before the recording sessions took place at the Emil Berliner studios in August 2020. Loch has a fascination for the way cool jazz “turned the wheel around” to connect with a wide audience, and references and connections with the cool jazz movement are scattered throughout this album. It is also the very first time that Helbock has included a tune by his teacher for over a decade, American pianist Peter Madsen, who toured extensively with Stan Getz and also taught Maria Schneider. While the overall mood and vibe of “The New Cool” tends towards the lyrical and the spacious, the range of expression is remarkably wide. The fine filigree piano opening of “I Feel Free” is in complete contrast to the anthemic grandeur which the trio reaches at the peak of “Angel Eyes”. Helbock also has a remarkable way of setting the tone of piece from the very first utterance: “Hymn for Sophie Scholl” is softly elegaic, whereas the forward momentum of “Truth” sounds like it could easily do duty as a film or TV theme. Helbock has been inspired by the innovations and concepts of Lennie Tristano, and his sense of affinity with the Chicago-born genius runs deep. Tristano once decreed that "the jazz musician's function is to feel.” Helbock Jansen and Studnitzky have taken that maxim to their hearts. In “The New Cool” it becomes a totally convincing and natural way to make music; and to be.

Arne Jansen - The Sleep Of ReasonCD / digitalIf you've ever heard the Berlin guitarist Arne Jansen, you'll know how difficult it is to forget his special sound. That passionate rummaging around in the warm diversity of the electric guitar, where bashful understatement mixes with playful sensuality. The humaneness become sound that always searches for what is special in the commonplace, exudes serenity and yet never itself comes to rest because its quest never ceases. Originally from Flensburg, Jansen moved to Berlin in 1996 to study jazz guitar at the University of the Arts until 2001. In workshops with Pat Metheny, John Abercrombie, Kurt Rosenwinkel and Philip Catherine he honed his craft and was soon playing alongside stars like Gitte Haenning, Tim Fischer and Katja Riemann. In the bands Jazzanova and, since 2010, the Nils Wülker Group, Jansen also attracted a lot of attention, but the centre of his creative universe is his own trio, with which he has released two critically acclaimed albums. Now, with his third album, his ACT debut "The Sleep Of Reason", Jansen again tells a very personal story. It is a collection of pieces about the Spanish painter Francisco Goya, who began his artistic career as a celebrated court painter, and who in the course of his long life transformed into a maverick visionary whose fateful influence on art cannot be overestimated, even 200 years after his death. On the contrary, Goya is becoming ever more contemporary, but Jansen wasn't thinking about the Spaniard's art-historical significance when he set out to translate Goya's visual imagery into sound. The initial spark for the album was a personal encounter. When playing a concert a few years ago in Madrid, Jansen took the time to visit the famed Prado art gallery. As he was just about to leave his glance fell upon Goya's Black Paintings. In particular the famous "Witches' Sabbath" and "A Pilgrimage to San Isidro", with their contorted faces and horrified eyes, left such a lasting impression on him that he speaks of this moment as the most intimate experience with art in his whole life. He knew immediately that that subject and that man would never let go of him, and back in Berlin he began occupying himself intensively with Goya. A veritable flood of ideas galvanised his composing quill into action, culminating in his album "The Sleep Of Reason". Jansen avoids simply delivering a soundtrack to Goya paintings as it is more about the feelings these works provoked in him. Although he did install some Goya reproductions in the studio during the production, what he does much more is enter a dialogue with the artist held over the distance of centuries, responding to the paintings with the tools and intentions of his own chosen language. He encounters the Spaniard from the standpoint of a modern-day German musician, who has no need of Hispanisms to penetrate the imagery. "The thing that fascinates me about Goya is that throughout the course of his life he continually closes in on what he considers to be the essence of being human," says Jansen. "He was always very honest with himself, and to do that justice, I also had to be honest with myself, and inserting Spanish influences wouldn't have been truthful." Instead he mixes in sound imagery from jazz and rock hymns, crowned by two cover versions of U2's "Love Is Blindness" and Brothers In Arms" by Dire Straits. Neither piece has a direct causal relationship to Goya, but they had a formative influence on Jansen's musical resumé and they fit in organically with the conceptual themes of the great Spaniard. Goya was of course a loner, but Jansen looked for a number of allies to help him exploit the spectrum of colours as fully as possible. He began developing and building on the tracks in his trio with drummer Eric Schaefer and bassist Andreas Edelmann, but he soon noticed that something was missing. Structural ideas reached out like Goya's chimeras. What were originally improvisations had to be refined. Forms that had already manifested themselves demanded new borders time and time again. Jansen went to Hamburg to record additional tracks with the keyboard explorer Friedrich Paravicini, who contributed not only a Hammond organ, cembalo, vibraphone and cello, but also the magical tones of the Ondes Martenot, a prehistoric electronic keyboard. But the sounded needed even more life: cellist Stephan Braun was recruited, and one track emerged in a duet with trumpeter Nils Wülker, whom Jansen has collaborated with for many years now. Co-producer Axel Reinemer, well known from the Berlin jazz producing guerrilla Jazzanova, also had a major influence on the final sound, spending more time in the studio with Jansen looking for the right textures and sounds than the trio itself in the original recording sessions. What results is a complex masterwork that needn't shy comparison with the painted originals because it neither copies them nor comments on them, but allows the affectionately brutal fascination that Goya's paintings exercise on the keen spirit of the 21st century to breathe musically. Goya's struggles – that becomes more than clear in this music – but also his fulfilment are still relevant to this day. Arne Jansen is a great contemporary sound-painter.Credits: Music composed by Arne Jansen unless otherwise noted Produced by Arne Jansen & Axel Reinemer Executive Producer: Siggi Loch Recorded and mixed by Axel Reinemer at Jazzanova Recording Studio Mastered by Klaus Scheuermann

70 minutes of the best jazz infotainment through the current ACT line-up at a special price.