Jazz at JAKI: Thomas Sauerborn - Madeleines

The cellist Muneer B. Fennell (formerly Muneer A. Fataah) was Carl Ludwig Hübsch's first and only jazz and improvisation teacher in Freiburg at the beginning of the 1980s. Before emigrating to Europe, Fennell had played as a cellist in New York together with drummer Doug Hammond and Steve Coleman in a legendary trio, even before Steve Coleman and the term M-Base achieved cult status.
Fennell, as well as Doug Hammond, stand for a music that comes from the African-American tradition, but whose protagonists remained rather marginalized because their approach was so special and because they were a generation older than the protagonists of M-Base.

The Madeleines, whose band name is borrowed from Marcel Proust's search for lost time, are dedicated to their music. The Madeleines build a bridge from the pre-M-Base era to today's European improvisational music, from the Afro-American-influenced jazz approach to Europe's "real-time jazz". A completely unique approach to rhythm, combined with a different concept of improvisation. The complexity of rhythmic overlapping meets the simplicity of clear motifs and polyphonic lines. All instruments are rhythm instruments. Improvisation over melody, melodies as tracks like in a drum group. A drum group with a drummer. Harmolodics in its infancy. Afro-Cuban, served square.

The interplay between Leonhard Huhn, Carl Ludwig Hübsch and Thomas Sauerborn gives memories wings.