Jazz at JAKI: Axel Fischbacher Trio

„Bebop Sketches“

Axel Fischbacher with his quintet and the Kammerphilharmonie Wuppertal was really under power a few days before the release and premiere of the 2020 album "Five Birds and Strings", he locked himself in the studio of Dudek in a trio with Tim Dudek (drums) and Nico Brandenburg (double bass) for two days, so to speak, to "come down" and recorded the music of the LP "Bebop Sketches".
At first, the studio session was not conceptual and not bound to a specific purpose. It was simply "jammed on", the recording ran with it. But it was this lightness with a real focus on the music, without the pressure of having to "deliver something", that created something special.
You can hear in every bar of the recordings how much joy and liveliness were present during these two days.
The resulting album "Bebop Sketches" includes improvisations based on often very well-known jazz pieces, which can definitely be called "the standards of standards". Fantastic compositions, which also "non-jazz players" at least from listening "somehow seem familiar", but certainly belong to the life content of every jazz musician.
These standards are a repertoire that Fischbacher's trio has known for decades, of course, and that makes it possible not so much to "play the songs" as to "play with them". There was little arranging or talking about during the recording process.
The LP elegantly portrays the musicians' own sound and approach to standard jazz. There are pieces and passages that are played very abstract and sketchy, others are close to the original and some are really "old fashioned". But it always sounds like Axel Fischbacher (guitar), Nico Brandenburg (double bass) and Tim Dudek (drums).
Here, from the gut, in great looseness and unity of the musicians, something quite wonderful has been achieved, freely after Dizzy Gillespie: "As a musician you have to keep one foot back in the past and have one foot forward into the future!"