Bobo Stenson Trio

Exclusive date in Germany: The luminary of European piano jazz makes a guest appearance in Leipzig.

Triple concert with Potsa Lotsa XL and Aly Keïta.

The term "poetry" is used so excessively in the context of instrumental music that the quiet virtuosity of true poets, who never focus on the technical or dexterity of their playing but always draw on the genuine metaphysics of sound, often falls by the wayside. One of these poets is the Swedish pianist Bobo Stenson. You only have to recapitulate the first notes of Charles Lloyd's album "The Call" (1993), in which the piano quietly announces itself from the background without actively intervening in the action until it unpretentiously takes over the saxophonist's line and carries it on like a poem by Rainer Maria Rilke. That is true poetry.

Bobo Stenson became acquainted with free jazz at an early age, but was never considered a free pianist. However, he took from free jazz what gave the genre its name: the freedom to express whatever wants to be said at a given moment. Or to quote Ornette Coleman: He couldn't be freer than free. So why pretend to have the same experience every night? Regardless of whether he was playing alongside Jan Garbarek, George Russell, Tomasz Stańko, Paul Motian or Charles Lloyd, he gave every context inner peace and stability, but also lightness and transparency.

It is precisely this transparency that he has been conjuring up in his own trio for five and a half decades now. As if he were not even touching the keys, he seems to make the piano speak through his inspiration alone. Stenson is a stylistically confident pointillist who can achieve a spectral effect with precisely placed dabs. With bassist Anders Jormin and drummer Jon Fält, he has found two like-minded musicians who share his understanding of poetry. 

Previously: Potsa Lotsa XL and Aly Keïta

(Triple concert)

Media