Oli Bott, Markus Stockhausen, Oliver Potratz, Eric Schaefer – Content-Blue (2023)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/44,1 kHz | Time – 57:41 minutes | 643 MB | Genre: Jazz
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © O-tone
The path as a goal – The story of the recording “Content” by Roman Rhode. The seven tracks are snapshots. Oli Bott simply calls them “content”. In both senses of the word. For the recordings reflect both the quartet’s joy in playing and the content: compositions reduced to the essentials that offer an astonishing amount of room for interaction and improvisation. In them, Bott, a cross-genre musician, composer and arranger, conveys his own vision of jazz: as freedom for personal development. “Nothing was rehearsed, nothing counted on,” Bott says. “We had no idea how it would start and how it would end, when the theme would come, who would improvise when.”
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Michael Wollny With Christian Weber & Eric Schaefer – Wartburg [Live] (2018)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 48:51 minutes | 959 MB | Genre: Jazz
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © ACT Music
Recorded on 15 September 2017 at the Wartburg castle near Eisenach in Thuringia, this live album shows the Michael Wollny trio in a more adventurous light than usual. With his trusty rhythm section (bassist Christian Weber and drummer Eric Schaefer), the German pianist throws himself into some truly daring swerves and embarks on melodies that take him over rocky ground. Over four tracks, the three men rub shoulders with Emile Parisien and his untamed, deft saxophone playing. It’s a meeting which we would have liked to follow through a few more songs… – Max Dembo
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Michael Wollny With Christian Weber & Eric Schaefer – Oslo (2018)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 57:13 minutes | 1,15 GB | Genre: Jazz
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © ACT Music
With Oslo, Michael Wollny and his trusty rhythm section (bassist Christian Weber and drummer Eric Schaefer) confirm that their project is as solid as ever. Recorded at Rainbow Studio in the Norwegian capital in September 2017, the album confirms that Wollny is one of the most skilful German jazz pianists of his generation. An improviser, here he deploys his staple piano style, with plenty of spaces and silences. His playing carries a sincere romanticism which never feels overdone, and a muted tonality. And whether he is tackling Fauré, Debussy or Rautavaara, or playing themes of his own devising, this fan of Keith Jarrett, Brad Mehldau, Esbjörn Svensson and Paul Bley imposes a signature piano style all his own. Note that on three tracks the trio are joined by the Norwegian Wind Ensemble. – Max Dembo
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Eric Schaefer, The Shredz – Bliss (2016)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/44,1 kHz | Time – 42:50 minutes | 455 MB | Genre: Jazz
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © ACT Music
On “Bliss”, Eric Schaefer and his band The Shredz blend the fusion jazz of the sixties with the jazz dub of the nineties and the club music of today to concoct an explosive hubble-bubble of a magic brew. Although it sometimes sounds like it, it’s not Voodoo,It is merely the logical continuation of what made Schaefer’s playing so unique from the outset: style and good taste, skills and know-how, complex compositions and improvisatory passion. Rooted in hardcore and matured in jazz, Schaefer plays a range that goes way beyond the scope of any academic colloquium.In 2013, to coincide with the 200th anniversary of Richard Wagner’s birth, Schaefer brought out his ACT debut as band leader in the form of “Who’s afraid of Richard W.?”. Without trepidation he gnawed Wagner’s music down to its skeleton, to then toss the bones into new constellat.
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Eric Schaefer – Kyoto Mon Amour (2017)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/88,2 kHz | Time – 49:55 minutes | 903 MB | Genre: Jazz
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © ACT Music
Drummer and composer Eric Schaefer has been described as the central shining star of the German jazz scene. On “Kyoto mon Amour”, he takes on the challenge of building bridges between Japanese and Western music. Over more than a decade, he has made three visits to Korea and stayed in Japan no fewer than six times, trips which have greatly influenced Schaefer’s musical psyche.
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Michael Wollny with Tim Lefebvre & Eric Schaefer – Ghosts (2022)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 37:37 minutes | 754 MB | Genre: Jazz
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © ACT Music
“As an improviser, you often find that it‘s not the compositions themselves you‘re playing, but your own memories of them. And as these memories come back to you in the moment, they assert their continuing existence in the here and now,” says Michael Wollny. In other words, songs are like ghosts. Wollny‘s new album “Ghosts” is a gathering of some of the ghosts that regularly haunt him. Typically for Wollny, they range from classics like Franz Schubert’s “Erlkönig” to jazz standards, film music, songs with a certain fragility by Nick Cave, say, or the band Timber Timbre, and also include his own darkly evocative original compositions.
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