Transatlantic Five – TRANSITIONS

With this highly energetic recording German vibraphonist Christopher

Dell, bassist Christian Ramond and drummer Klaus Kugel team up with

the American saxophonist Ken Vandermark and trumpeter Nate Wooley

to continue to expand their musical world between traditional and expe-

rimental jazz with great sensitivity and imagination.

The central questions driving this groundbreaking project read as follows:

What happens when European avant-garde musicians meet musicians

from the USA specialising in contemporary improvised music? When a

trio of vibraphone, percussion and double bass expand agogically woven

playing styles in real time in a highly virtuosic way with saxophone, clarinet

and trumpet, whose playing posture is determined by American post-

jazz performativity? This aggravating experiment is dared by Wooley,

Vandermark and the trio Dell Ramond Kugel in a special constellation of

instruments that not by accident is reminiscent of the ensemble line-up

of American saxophonist, bass clarinetist and composer Eric Dolphy‘s

canonical recording „Out to lunch“. Recorded February 25 in 1964,

Dolphy‘s first album for Blue Note was and is highly praised, among

others by the German jazz critic Hans-Jürgen Schaal as a completely new

sound concept, an „airy framework of colourful abstraction“ and diverse

rhythms; „half chamber music transparency, half free jazz laboratory“.

Taking Dolphy’s work as point of departure, both Wooley and Vander-

mark as well as Dell-Ramond-Kugel leave the comfort zones of their

usual realms to advance to new dynamics and sound languages.

The repertoire consists of original compositions inspired by their gre-

at admiration for and research on the work of Dolphy.

Within this meticulously conceived framework this intriguing project is

neither about traditionalism nor about crossover, but about the most

differentiated elaborations, overlays of specific working methods and

synergetic structural improvisations in relation to a special moment

in music history. The extraordinary line-up aims at nothing less than

actualize into a contemporary format the unearthing of the innovative

power and special dialectic of abstraction and concretion that once

produced Dolphy‘s „Out to lunch“ and to let something new emerge

from it. The international, cross-cultural cast thus closes a gap that has

formed between the highly differentiate improvisation scenes between

the continents over the last fifty years.

With this ensemble, Dell Ramond Kugel together with their American

bandmates Wooley and Vandermark set out on a new adventure for

the ear that defies musical and cultural boundaries. An outstanding

debut that promises more to come in the future.