Christoph Irniger, born 1979, is a Swiss saxophonist, composer and bandleader. According to the Sunday edition of the Neue Zürcher Zeitung he is “undoubtedly one of the greatest talents of his generation.” In recent years, Irniger has made a name for himself in a range of line-ups, playing jazz, rock and related musical styles. As a musician from a generation which likes to work on multiple projects in eclectic styles, he leads a range of outfits, all distinct and surprising musically. The Swiss magazine Jazz ’N‘ More writes: “He comes up with something new each time by leaving the beaten tracks of sound. He doesn’t just look briefly left and right; he fights his way into the thicket.” An instrumentalist with a firm education, and a composer with an artistic vision, he consistently generates new ideas, realised thanks to a passion for music. German magazine Jazzthetik says: “People who know about jazz will confirm that he is one of the most promising musicians in contemporary Swiss jazz.”
Irniger is leader of the band Pilgrim (with Dave Gisler, Stefan Aeby, Raffaele Bossard and Michael Stulz) and the Christoph Irniger Trio (with Raffaele Bossard and Ziv Ravitz), which between them have released four albums so far: two by the Trio, Gowanus Canal (Intakt Records 2013) and Octopus (Intakt Records, 2015) and two from Pilgrim, Mt. Tongariro (Between The Lines, 2011) and Italian Circus Story (Intakt Records, 2014). The latter featured in three best album lists of 2014, including Cadence Magazine (USA). Jazzwise (UK) described them as “a homegrown rising young sax star’s quintet!“ Irniger’s debut recording Chat Noir was released in 2008 on Brambus Records.
Irniger loves jazz, and his playing is strongly rooted in this tradition, influenced by its various exponents. He does not see jazz as representing a particular sound or content, however, but as a way of making music. He says, “to me jazz is that music which always processes the music of its time. It’s more about how you play than what you play.” He gets ideas from every style of music, and from life itself; in this sense, the main inspirations are his home, Lake Zurich, the mountains, his family, people, travelling (above all New York) and a range of other art-forms. They give him the themes and feed his passion for music, and Irniger places melody above everything else. Even in dense, complex passages, or within free jazz playing, he seeks out the moment, and tries to give the various instruments’ melodic lines equal weight. The journalist Peter Haffner writes of his compositions, “the pieces are tone poems, which show that catchy melodies and complex soundscapes need not be mutually exclusive, in fact they each need the other to come to fruition.”
His regular visits to Berlin and New York have led to a number of diverse collaborations, including: Nasheet Waits (No Reduce Jaywalkin’ (nWog, 2013)), Don Philippe, and the band Counterpoints with Ohad Talmor, Bänz Oester and Vinnie Sperrazza. He has also played with Dave Douglas, Chris Lightcap, Dan Weiss, Nils Wogram, Claudio Puntin, Max Frankl, Stefan Rusconi, Mats Spillmann, Christian Weber, Chris Wiesendanger and Vera Kappeler. He was a member of the Lucerne Jazz Orchestra for seven years and can be heard on four of their recordings. He is also co-leader of the prog-rock band Cowboys from Hell.
From 2000 to 2006 Irniger studied music education at the Zurich Jazz School, and performance at the Lucerne School of Music with Christoph Grab and Nat Su. In the following years he took lessons from Dave Liebman, Mark Turner and Ari Hoenig. He won the Friedel Wald Foundation development award in 2004, received the Borsa di Studio for Siena Jazz University in 2006 and achieved third place in the 2010 ZKB Jazz Prize with the Cowboys from Hell. Between 2015 and 2017 his band Pilgrim were awarded high priority act from Pro Helvetia – Swiss Arts Council. His work has been documented on twenty albums to date, five under his own name. He has played concerts and tours throughout Europe, Asia and the USA.
Christoph Irniger initiated the concert series Jazz im Seefeld and was co-founder of the Jazzwerkstatt Zürich festival. He is also part of the programming team for the Unerhört! Festival and teaches at Zurich University of the Arts and the Musikschule Konservatorium in Zurich.
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Below is the track listing for the Crazeology Radio show dated 17th June 2017. A link to the show can be found here:
Below is the track listing for the Boogie Wonderland Show dated 15th June 2017. A link to the show can be found here:
Drummer, composer, arranger, educated M. D. Raised in Szczecin, Poland, currently based in Copenhagen, Denmark. Master in Jazz Performance and Composition at Danish National Academy of Music in Odense, Denmark, Rhytmic Music Department. Leader of different projects from trio, quartet to large ensemble. Active member of collective bands, mostly Danish-Polish, like Entrails United, Entropy, The Beat Freaks among others. Grand Prix Winner of 49. International Jazz Nad Odrą Festival in Wrocław, Poland (2013). Receiver of Entrepreneurship Prize from the Danish Musicians’ Union (2016). The previous records have been critically acclaimed in Europe as well as the US. The upcoming release Atlantic (MultiKulti Project) features the guitar wizard Gilad Hekselman and focuses on finding a common ground for various inspirations.
Radek took up piano at the age of 6 and classical percussion at the age of 11. Even tough music was an important part of his upbringing it was not until late teenage years when he developed an interest for the drums and started pursuing various styles of music. After graduating from med school in Poland he moved to Denmark to leave everything behind and investigate jazz and improvised music on a deeper level. He is currently pursuing an Advanced Postgraduate Diploma specialising in combining contemporary music with modern jazz drumming. He has toured, recorded and performed in Poland, Denmark, Germany, USA, Canada, UK, Norway, Ghana, Benin, Kenya and Tanzania. Some of the highlights of his collaborations include the legendary Polish trumpeter Tomasz Stańko, as well as guitarists Gilad Hekselman and Lionel Loueke. He is also active on both Danish and Polish scenes, playing with who’s who from various musical genres.
Below is the track listing for the Crazeology Radio show dated 10th June 2017. A link to the show can be found here:
Below is the track listing for the Boogie Wonderland Show dated 8th June 2017. A link to the show can be found here:
For pianist, composer and Guggenheim fellow Myra Melford, the personal and the poetic have always been intimately and deeply connected. Raised outside Chicago in a house designed by the renowned architect Frank Lloyd Wright, Melford grew up literally surrounded by art. Where most of us find the beauty in our childhood homes through the memories and associations we make within its four walls, Melford saw early on that aesthetic expression could both be built from and be a structure for profound emotions.
Over the course of a career spanning more than two decades, Melford has taken that lesson to heart, crafting a singular sound world that harmonizes the intricate and the expressive, the meditative and the assertive, the cerebral and the playful. Drawing inspiration from a vast spectrum of cultural and spiritual traditions and artistic disciplines, she has found a “spark of recognition” in sources as diverse as the writings of the 13th-century Persian poet Rumi and the Uruguayan journalist Eduardo Galeano; the wisdom of Zen Buddhism and the Huichol Indians of Mexico; and the music of mentors like Jaki Byard, Don Pullen, and Henry Threadgill.
The latest incarnation of this ever-evolving cross-disciplinary dialogue is Language of Dreams, which will premiere in November 2013 at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. The multi-media work is inspired by Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano’s Memory of Fire trilogy, a history of the Americas told through indigenous myths and the accounts of European colonizers. The piece will combine music for Melford’s quintet Snowy Egret with narration by a multi-lingual actor, dance by Los Angeles-based choreographer Oguri, and video by Bay Area filmmaker David Szlasa.
While Language of Dreams is her most ambitious project to date, it is not the first time that Melford has constructed a piece from such a wealth of disciplines. In 2006, the Walker Arts Center premiered Knock on the Sky, a piece inspired by Albert Camus’ essay “The Myth of Sisyphus” and Kobo Abe’s novel Woman in the Dunes, in which Melford collaborated with New York City–based choreographer/dancer Dawn Akemi Saito and Austrian architect Michael Haberz.
Snowy Egret, Melford’s latest working group, made its debut in 2012. The quintet comprises some of creative music’s most inventive and individual voices: trumpeter Ron Miles, guitarist Liberty Ellman, bassist Stomu Takeishi, and drummer Tyshawn Sorey. Melford’s spacious, contemplative, exploratory compositions have long attracted and almost demanded such forward-thinking artists. Her past ensembles have included Be Bread, with Cuong Vu, Ben Goldberg, Brandon Ross, Stomu Takeishi, and Matt Wilson; The Same River, Twice, with Dave Douglas, Chris Speed, Erik Friedlander, and Michael Sarin; Crush, with Takeishi, Vu, and Kenny Wolleson.
Melford also currently is one-third of the collective Trio M with bassist Mark Dresser and drummer Matt Wilson; their most recent CD, The Guest House, was one of 2012’s most acclaimed releases. She also performs in the duo ::Dialogue:: with clarinetist Ben Goldberg and will release her first solo album in October 2013, a collection of work inspired by the paintings of the late visual artist Don Reich.
Melford’s musical evolution has long run in parallel with her spiritual search, a personal journey that has led her to Aikido, Siddha Yoga, and the wisdom traditions of the Huichol people of Mexico’s central highlands. Sonically, that quest is expressed via her wide-ranging palette, which expands from the piano to the harmonium and electronic keyboards or to amplifying barely audible sounds in the piano’s interior. Her playing can build from the blissful and lyrical to the intense and angular, with accents from Indian, African, Cuban and Middle Eastern musics or the cerebral abstraction of European and American jazz and classical experimentalism.
While Melford’s music continually reaches toward a state of transcendence, it still remains deeply rooted in the blues traditions she heard growing up in the Chicago area. In 1978, she first encountered violinist Leroy Jenkins, her introduction to the AACM, whose boundary-free, adventurous approach to jazz remains an influence. She would go on to study with Jenkins, together forming the collective trio Equal Interest with multireedist Joseph Jarman in 1997.
Melford moved to the east coast in 1982 and began performing in New York City’s thriving Downtown scene, making her recorded debut as a leader in 1990; she has since released more than twenty albums as a leader or co-leader and appeared on more than 40 releases as a side-person. In 2000, she spent a year in North India on a Fulbright scholarship, immersing herself in the region’s classical, devotional, and folk music. Melford relocated to the west coast in 2004, joining the faculty of the University of California, Berkeley as an associate professor of contemporary improvised music. There, she engages students in the theory and practice of improvisation, employing diverse creative strategies.
Her work has earned Melford some of the highest accolades in her field. In 2013 alone, she was named a Guggenheim Fellow and received the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation’s Performing Artist Award and a Doris Duke Residency to Build Demand for the Arts for her efforts to re-imagine the jazz program at San Francisco’s Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. She was also the winner of the 2012 Alpert Award in the Arts for Music. She has been honored numerous times in DownBeat’s Critics Poll since 1991 and was nominated by the Jazz Journalists Association as Pianist of the Year in 2008 and 2009 and Composer of the Year in 2004.
Below is the track listing for the Crazeology Radio show dated 3rd June 2017. A link to the show can be found here:
Below is the track listing for the Boogie Wonderland Show dated 1st June 2017. A link to the show can be found here:
Photo © Steve Morrison
As a boy, Billy Jenkins (b.1956, Bromley, Kent) sang in occasional choirs at St. Paul's and Westminster Abbey; as a teenager toured and recorded for legendary record label boss Clive Davis with art rock band Burlesque (1972-77); performed as a young adult with 'alternative musical comedy' duo Trimmer & Jenkins (1979-82) and drummer Ginger Baker before founding (in 1981) the VOGC (the Voice of God Collective - 'The voice of the people is the voice of God' [attrib. Plato and others] - to which BJ adds, '...and the religion is music!' ).
Since then he has produced a large body of over 40 recorded albums including 'Scratches of Spain', 'Motorway At Night', 'Entertainment USA' and 'Music For Two Cassette Machines'. Some of his recordings are about his SE London environs and include 'Sounds Like Bromley', 'Greenwich', 'Still Sounds Like Bromley' and 'Suburbia'.
From 1983 - 93 he lived and worked at Wood Wharf Rehearsal Studios in Greenwich, where he welcomed an average of 26.6 musicians through the doors every day.
Projects have included recording and performing with The Fun Horns of Berlin, improvised musical boxing Big Fights, Music For Low Strung Guitar, directing Anglo-Belgium and London Meets Vienna ensembles, improvising to film, collaborating in words and music with Ian McMillan, Ben Watson, Kate Pullinger a.o., composing and performing with The Gogomagogs, compositions for six guitars, 'The Drum Machine Plays The Battlemarch Of Consumerism' for six drumkits, curating the Vortex World Cup Jazz Ball and sporadic festival and club appearances on the continent and UK.
Photo © Steve Morrison
Member of the Arts Council of England Improvised Touring panel from 1993 - 98.
He has been nominated three times for a Paul Hamlyn Award - in 2008, 2010 and 2011.
In education, he was Visiting Tutor in Guitar Techniques at Lewisham F.E.College (1990-96), guest lecturer at the Royal Academy of Music '95, Guest big band director at Middlesex University '96. Ensemble Masterclasses at the International Summeracademy Freie Kunstschule, Berlin '97. 'Moving On' music workshops with Andy Sheppard a.o., Belfast '99. Musical Director and workshop leader for Greenwich Young People's Jazz Orchestra, Blackheath 2000. School Workshops with the Pied Piper Project, Yorkshire, March 2001. Visiting Artist on the Jazz Faculty at Trinity College of Music (2001-2) and at the Royal Academy of Music from 2002 to 2009.
In 2002 he created and presented over forty live two hour Sunday lunchtime radio shows in London on Resonance 104.4FM, entitled 'One Way Single Parent Family Favourites'.
For 2006/07, ‘Billy Jenkins' Songs Of Praise' was created especially for a short UK tour in his 50th year, with instrumentation and personnel capable of merging the myriad strands of Jenkins' musical and performing career into a fast flowing spontaneous and joyous celebration of humanist music making. Songs of Praise, indeed!
From 1995 he performed live with his Blues Collective, solo, or duo with fellow guitarist Steve Morrison in Here Is The Blues! He also appeared as 'Billy the Aviator' in Tom Bancroft's award winning musical children's show 'Kidsamonium'.
At the 2010 London Jazz Festival, he performed with the BBC Big Band playing his music arranged by long time VOGC saxophonist Iain Ballamy but since then, he has ceased travelling and performing.
Having spend seven years (2008 -14) creating and conducting humanist funerals in SE London, he returned to researching, composing, writing and recording - but his oversensitivity to sound severely limits his music making.
His last two album releases were selected by Mojo Magazine as a 'Top Ten Underground Album Of The Year' in both 2014 and 2015.
In 2016, his album 'True Love Collection' (released in 1998) was listed by the BBC as one of the '50 Greatest Ever Jazz Albums'.
Below is the track listing for the Crazeology Radio show dated 27th May 2017. A link to the show can be found here:
Below is the track listing for the Boogie Wonderland Show dated 25th May 2017. A link to the show can be found here:
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October 2019
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