What happens when musicians and audience can no longer be close? In the year of the corona crisis, jazz festivals found different strategies for this. It is even more exciting to see what ideas musicians come up with – for themselves and the future of improvised music. They need to listen, because their livelihoods are at stake.
From Franziska Buhre
How hollow and inanimate, even incomplete, a room can sound in which apart from musicians there is only furniture, where walls and the ceiling immediately reflect the sound and only reinforce the emptiness, like a queasy feeling in the stomach. In the face of concerts on the screen, the loss of one’s own physical presence becomes noticeable – a painful experience of no longer being able to be part of the sound event through presence. And so when watching streaming you always miss not only the tangible listening pleasure but also yourself in the environment of inspired acoustics.
Pizza and hunger
At the end of May, as one of the first festivals hit hard by the lockdown and international travel restrictions for artists, the Moers Festival tried to breathe soul into the concert streaming with visual nonsense. The partner for the streaming was Arte Concert. During the concerts, the actor Matthias Heße acted on a green screen: In silver overalls and with a blonde wig, he lolled around on a projected sofa or fawn, sliced pizza or looked motionless into space. When a Berlin festival organizer, contrary to the official announcement that only a very limited number of journalists and photographers were allowed in the hall, revealed his presence by assuring other people on social media that the actor’s actions interfered with the enjoyment of the music not, it was clear that concert promoters in Germany would still have to learn a lot about streaming.
Jazzfest Berlin did more than just do its homework. In the summer, orders for two video works were awarded to the collective for improvised and composed music (KIM) and international musicians were invited to talk about their current situation in videos. In the streamings at the beginning of November, also with Arte Concert as a partner, video works by participating artists could also be seen, which resulted in an attractive interplay of spatial impression, interaction of the musicians with one another and with the projection. The opening of eight radio houses of the state broadcasting corporations for concert streaming with local ensembles as part of the jazz festival was also gratifying. The fact that radio stations support musicians with their resources seems expandable, even appropriate, as long as the corona crisis continues. Ronny Graupe could not use such means. The guitarist initiated the concert series in March Into The Shed. In over 50 streams from the Berlin Club of Polish Failures, international musicians of various types gave each other the handle – an important signal to colleagues and fans who were stuck at home, be it out of existential fear, depression about canceled concerts or as an escape to other activities. “It was important to me that there are no firmly rehearsed things and compositions, but that everything is improvised,” Graupe explains in an interview. “It was intentionally rough, so it is not a sell-out by the artists. People should go home hungry or stay at home. If everything had been free and high end, I would not have felt good. ”Graupe profited from the many musical encounters in the duo. And his view of professional practice has changed: “If you suddenly have a concert again, I now notice it much more intensely.”
Back to Germany
The pandemic is changing everything for musicians, from familiar work processes and environments, through cycles for publications and tour planning, to giving up where they live. A day before his fall departure, drummer Joe Hertenstein recorded an album with a New York band. Fourteen years of his career in New York are behind him, he continues to cultivate the close contacts: “I’m currently recording a remote album with a band in Brooklyn,” he says on the phone in Berlin. “Everyone goes into the studio and we send the tracks back and forth and see if it’s correct and feels good.”
In March Niklas Lukassen had to say goodbye to goals for which he had been working for years and to leave New York head over heels without his double bass. He studied at the Manhattan School of Music, and Ron Carter remained his mentor afterwards. Lukassen was asked for concerts with Mike Stern and as a guest at rehearsals with the Village Vanguard Big Band under John Riley – more than uncertain whether these opportunities would arise again. Now he lives in Berlin again, where he finds a completely different starting position: “I don’t like that the scenes are very separate. Unfortunately, this is extremely reflected in the mentalities. I also like to play freely improvised music or contemporary jazz. As an electric bass player, I’m very rarely asked, because then I’m the jazz musician for others. When I play a pop-jazz gig, I notice that people are not that strong improvisers. It’s different in New York. Because you have the same people who play different styles, the audience is more open there. ”Still, he is confident:“ I think there will be a lot of very elaborate albums. What distinguishes the jazz scene from all other scenes is that almost all jazz musicians are also composers. In this regard, there will be a great wave worldwide that you not only shine as a player, but also as a composer. “
Overcome distances and hierarchies
Probably every musician can now tell something about working with others at a distance, whether about online lessons by students in their own district, video conferences in a different time zone or recordings produced at different times from which an album is created. Nicola Hein is not satisfied with finished productions. As a doctoral student at New York’s Columbia University, the guitarist can currently live in Germany and develop new formats: “It’s important to me that you look for other platforms and spaces in order to continue working internationally. I started improvising with others telematically over the Internet. Purely musically and in the areas of music and dance, music and video. ”Specifically, Hein and the media artist Claudia Schmitz invite other musicians and video artists to collaborate; they have toured Asia and South America in recent years. At the beginning of September, as part of Ars Electronica, they presented the first version of an app that uses AR technology (augmented reality) with a musician and a video artist from Mexico and a pianist from California: You can use your smartphone to create video sculptures live see in the room and listen to the improvised music through headphones. In the future, this should also work live when the artists and the audience are in different locations; further collaborations are planned with artists in Colombia, Japan and South Korea.
The bass trombonist Maxine Troglauer is also thinking about the future of the shared experience of musicians and the audience: “I hope that new formats will emerge that are intended for a smaller audience out of necessity and thus automatically become more inclusive and active. That the hierarchy of “classical” stage high up – audience down in the dark is broken up in favor of more creativity and freedom. ”At the end of October Troglauer returned to New York to continue her studies at the Manhattan School of Music, initially purely virtually. “My practice has changed a lot, practicing and making music is now completely limited to home. As a brass player in an apartment on the 5th floor, I had to get used to the fact that there were people around me all the time. I am immensely thrown back on my personality and my skills, I practice solo pieces, solo improvisation and think about solo performances. “She is critical of the introduction of recording and playback technologies into almost every musician’s household:” Suddenly becomes Musicians are expected not only to have an excellent command of their instrument, but that they should also be able to do so in all genres, plus record, stream, edit, publish, promote, compose, and arrange themselves – and at the same time 20 applications for financial support Write funding, because in the end nobody wants to pay for it. This requirement puts me under enormous pressure at times and I am afraid that I will not be able to keep up with this rapid technological self-optimization requirement – which, by the way, is also extremely expensive. “
Music enthusiasts should understand such words as an appeal. To ensure that musicians * are not simply forgotten when they disappear from the virtual screen or were not yet present there. We will meet again, gathered in a room, outside or inside, with chats in the background or deeply satisfied the moment we become aware of our fellow human beings while listening. We just can’t help it.
