Joachim Kuhn French Trio: The Way

Every new band marks a new phase in Joachim Kühn's work and broadens his horizons. In double bassist Thibault Cellier and drummer Sylvain Darrifourcq, he has found two like-minded people with whom he can realize exactly what is important to him in this phase of his work, around his 80th birthday: to progress on the path to even more musical freedom. Joachim Kühn describes playing with the two younger musicians as making music "the French way, with lightness, speed and elegance". As a trio, they manage to do this intuitively, almost without any agreements and with great urgency The back story is quickly told. Sylvain Darrifourcq had known Joachim Kühn for some time as a percussionist in Émile Parisien's quartet, also through shared playing experiences. The encounter with Thibault Cellier came about more by chance in a Parisian hotel. But Thibault was no stranger to Joachim. He appreciated his playing with Sylvain in the group "Novembre", of which he had heard a record. The contacts were quickly made. Four months later, the two Frenchmen were in the pianist's home studio in Ibiza, making music and recording as a trio, completely free of constraints. When Joachim Kühn heard the tapes a little later, he said: "That's how I want to sound now. In other words: The band was born Playing with piano trios has been an integral part of Joachim Kühn's musical biography for six decades. Alongside the solo, it is and remains the top class for a pianist. With his first trio, formed in 1964 in his home town of Leipzig, he made his ambition to help write jazz history clear. Since moving to Paris at the end of the 1960s, he has frequently collaborated with French musicians Formed in 1974 and highly successful for over two and a half decades, the band with bassist Jean-François Jenny-Clark and drummer Daniel Humair demonstrated an innovative and totally interactive style of music that had never been heard before. Joachim Kühn calls this band "the trio of my life". But even after that there were astonishing developments and discoveries. The trio with the Moroccan guembri player Majid Bekkas and the Spanish percussionist Ramón López succeeded in bridging the gap between jazz, European, African and Arabic cultures. And the New Trio with double bassist Chris Jennings and drummer Eric Schaefer fascinated with their clearly contoured and wide-open playing Joachim Kühn's new French Trio is in some ways a continuation of the one with Jean-François Jenny-Clark and Daniel Humair. But history does not repeat itself. And free jazz, as Joachim Kühn understands it, has long since outgrown its infancy. Today, says the pianist, it is equally about freedom and spontaneous structuring. It is about the essential, as with all great role models, especially in their later creative phases. This is the case with Bach, Coltrane, Ornette Coleman and Joachim's brother Rolf Kühn. It is always a path that leads to the essential and into the open.