Janning Trumann New York Quartet

Der Puls der Stadt

Among jazz cities, New York is still unchallenged. A city where the technical polish that young jazz musicians have learned burns in and becomes experience, an integral part of their musical imagination. The winner of the German Jazz Award 2024, Janning Trumann, has maintained an ensemble that connects him with his time in New York right up to the present day. In the fall of 2024, five years after Be Here, Gone and Nowhere, the quartet's debut album, Divide the Zero will be released. It is the third album with which Trumann is recalibrating his New York Quartet.

The New York experience also includes a determination to break new ground. In the current edition of his New York Quartet, for example, Trumann has redefined the static alongside the bass of Drew Gress and the impulsive drumming of Jochen Rueckert and brought in the up-and-coming saxophonist Caroline Davis. The absence of a harmony instrument emphasizes the balance between the individual instrumental voices and requires - if melody, harmony and rhythm are not to be abandoned - a more open and delicate form of interplay in which the four protagonists have to react to each other in a very concentrated manner. Sometimes the saxophone and trombone act in improvised two-part harmony, sometimes they lead their voices as a canon or step out of the group interaction individually and open up the space to play through the conceivable permutations of the individual voices, then again the bass and drums act in closely coordinated dynamics or ripple the surface of the joint playing time with their impulses. The city is audible in this music, its irrevocable pulse, its powerful energy.