Translation of the German review:

With "Ten Years", the Jens Düppe Quartet presents a very nice album of their own compositions. Dominique Klatte, owner of the label "Jazz On Vinyl", arranged a recording situation for the musicians in which the pieces could be played live and analog on a master tape. This musical and sonic jewel is now available to music lovers as a master tape copy.

Jens Düppe (drums, composition), Frederik Köster (trumpet), Lars Duppler (piano) and Christian Ramond (bass) form a top-class quartet. They have international concert experience and are well-known and popular musicians. The Jens Düppe Quartet's jazz is modern and fresh.

The title "Living Rhythm" begins with exciting jazzy refinements and develops into a high-class jazz number thanks to Frederik Köster's brilliantly played trumpet solo. In contrast, "Consistence" sneaks up with bass and muted trumpet and unfolds via the piano and Jens Düppe's outstanding drum work. "7 und 4" is a very energetic jazz piece. Christian Ramond's bass forms the foundation for Lars Duppler's piano, who presents his expressiveness on the keys in an exemplary manner. "This Is Not The End" brings jazz lovers profound and intelligently intricate jazz. The title is like a dialog between the instruments, with the trumpet almost taking on a narrative function. "The Chase" starts off in a relaxed manner, lives from a wonderful Latin rhythm groove and a fabulously quirky trumpet solo introduction and develops into a true musical bloom as it progresses. The album closes with the improvisational piece "Blue Skies (Bavaria)".

The miking, the recording, the mix, the mastering, the sound, the stereo imaging and the localization of the instruments have been very well implemented. The extraordinary dynamics suit this type of jazz particularly well. The compact sound is reminiscent of a live concert. The very high quality of the master tape copy rounds off the package. If the music manages to inspire my thoughts when I forget the real world, as happens with this album, then everything has been done right.

I conducted an interview with Jens Düppe in December 2023.

Claus: The album title is "Ten Years". Is that your anniversary?

Jens: It's our 10th anniversary on stage. There is less space for music on a record than on a CD, so we had to limit ourselves in terms of time. "Ten Years" is our personal "best of" the three albums "Anima", "Dancing Beauty" and "The Beat" that we recorded before that. The last piece "Blue Skies (Bavaria)" was inspired by Dominique Klatte and is a free jazz improvisation. The blue Bavarian sky is to be seen with a wink.

Claus: Your musicians Frederik Köster, Lars Duppler and Christian Ramond, as well as yourself: You are no strangers to the jazz scene. I'm interested in how you came together as a band.

Jens: Of course, chance played a major role. I've known the pianist Lars Duppler the longest. When I came to Cologne, he was one of my first bandleaders. I played as a sideman in his projects. Christian Ramond and I were sidemen in other projects. He fits perfectly into many musical contexts. There's never a musical question mark in anything he plays. That's why I asked him if he would like to play in my band. My former trumpet player couldn't make some of the dates in the very first concerts, which were perhaps eleven years ago. I knew Frederik Köster from listening to him. I realized very early on that the way I compose is something special in this sense, that melodically and above all harmonically I don't have a "Mussle Memory", which would mean that I do one thing in a composition and then the path to the next would already be clear because I had already played it so often, for example. Conventional patterns are therefore not automatically available to me beforehand. That can have advantages and disadvantages. In any case, I end up with more atypical compositions, especially for the piano, but also for the trumpet. I start from the sound result. I didn't know before whether it was difficult for the trumpet to play a passage in one piece without a break. Frederik Köster is just the man for the job because he can play it all with ease. So I had the perfect band. We all spent a lot of time together and therefore know each other very well. We already know how each other reacts musically. I'm really happy that we were able to stay together for such a long time.

Claus: You recorded this recording with Dominique Klatte, analog and live on the master tape. How was the set and the atmosphere during the recording? Was this kind of recording something new for you?

Jens: It wasn't entirely new for us because we had already played live in the studio for a record production a few years ago. There was an audience back then, which made it easier because I was playing like in a concert. I can't repeat anything and have a completely different dynamic of playing through the evening with the audience. The preparation was different with Dominique Klatte. He had experienced us live and that was enough for him to say: I want to do this with you. He came to Düsseldorf to the Jazzschmiede and only had a few microphones in a very good position, which allowed the sound and dynamics of the band to come across exactly. If I take more microphones, e.g. 16 tracks for the drums alone, who is going to be able to mix it as if a pair of ears were sitting in the audience and hearing it? I would say that's virtually impossible. Only the person who knows the music really well can do that. That would only be the musician himself and he can't record and mix himself. Dominique had placed us on stage in such a way that it suited him. And then we just played. The special thing was to build up the atmosphere and the joy of playing live without an audience so that we got into the flow of playing. There was only one piece where there was a misunderstanding in the arrangement and so we wanted to play it again. I am extremely satisfied with this recording. It's honest, it shows us exactly as we are and as the songs are.

Claus: I would like a statement on the subject of analog. Does it make a difference to you as a musician to record music completely analog on tape as opposed to digital?

Jens: We make 100% acoustic music in the band, which is characterized by the nuances and timbres of each instrument: the highly dynamic, nuanced and multi-faceted playing, this very finely balanced sound, what everyone gets out of their instrument and how everything flows together. That's what makes this music, that's a very important part of the quality of this music. The more of this can be heard on a production, the better the intention of the music comes across, the closer we are to what we want. If frequencies were to be cut off or compressed and the signal distorted as a result, then we would be moving away from the result of what we played live, the less it would be the music we were making. The analog recording from Dominique's experienced hand is a very sharp representation of what we artists do on stage. It's exactly in the spirit of this music. The analog production on tape has a very high intrinsic value. Dynamics bring the music to life.

Claus: How do you prepare a concert before you go on stage? Do you have a concept and then follow an improvisational framework or are the pieces more clearly structured and styled?

Jens: We want to get into this flow, this playing together and feel comfortable with our sound. When we get into the flow, it makes no difference whether we are recorded or not, whether there is an audience or not. Each of us arrives on stage differently. Some of us drink a beer beforehand, others a glass of wine, tea or coffee. One closes their eyes, the other doesn't. We get into the flow of playing better when pieces with more compositional elements are played first. For pieces with more improvisational parts, it's about being in this flow first. At the end, we are then able to play a free improvisation for which there are no instructions. In principle, however, all my pieces have a composed and an improvised part. The weighting of these parts varies from piece to piece. There are pieces with a strongly composed part and also those with a lot of flexibility. Then I only know: where do I come from musically, where do I want to go and everything else is free. These are structures that are often used.

Claus: What kind of jazz does the Jens Düppe Quartet belong to?

Jens: In the world of jazz, in the world of music and in cultural policy, this question is currently an important topic. There is a lot of talk about it at panel discussions. What kind of jazz do we want? Why is this question being asked? There are so many types of jazz, there are so many styles, that people can get restless. Until the introduction of electric instruments, jazz was acoustic. The instruments that made up jazz were clear, such as the rhythm section with all kinds of horns. At some point there was the electric guitar or the semi-acoustic guitar. At that time, synthesizers had not yet been invented. At this point, we are still a good while before digitalization. Until then, there was still a clear common thread in the development of the whole story. About instruments, about harmonies, about melodies. From the very beginning (since its birth), jazz has always made connections with all kinds of other musical styles. Then came digitalization. This gave rise to further directions. If you look at the jazz family tree, it's currently extremely ramified. The branch on the far right no longer has any idea what the branch on the far left is doing. They have almost nothing to do with each other anymore. What was once an opportunity for jazz can also become a problem for jazz. Hence the outcry: what kind of jazz do we want? What is jazz anyway? A lot of Balkan music has come into jazz, like irregular time signatures, completely new instruments. There was a time when it was suddenly fashionable to play without a bass. You can no longer define jazz in terms of harmony, melody or instruments, there are virtually no parameters that you can use to say, hey, everything that gets stuck here like in a sieve is jazz. The question of what jazz is confronts the people who provide public funding with the next task: they have a manageable pot of funding that is supposed to benefit jazz or improvised music. This then becomes a topical, explosive, political or social question: what kind of jazz do we want here? Digitalization has made the number of jazz styles even more extensive. Production on the computer has an influence on live music. There are jazz festivals where you can no longer find a band that plays even halfway acoustically, that is set up instrumentally as it was in the 1960s, in the heyday of Miles Davis or John Coltrane. What is jazz? That's a really difficult question to which you can no longer get a clear answer today.

My definition is: jazz is music that still has the spirit of jazz. By that I mean a certain openness towards the entire universe of music. That's why I can't tell you exactly what kind of jazz the Jens Düppe Quartet makes. But I can say the following: in the way we improvise, there are definitely moments that are harmonically, melodically and soloistically comparable to improvisations from the 1960s. There are also elements of a kind of "minimal music", like in the piece "Living Rhythm", where different layers of rhythms are very slowly superimposed and make up the first important part of the song. There is also a part of repetitive music in it. But there are also very free stories, such as in "Blue Skies (Bavaria)". We also have spots like this in other pieces, often in the middle of the piece as a solo with free improvisation. So we have also incorporated a kind of free jazz. Free jazz is often associated with: It's wild, loud, weird, everyone's sweating and rolling their eyes. Free improvisation is not the same as free jazz. In our song structures, we have elements that come from the jazz of the last century, but are also rooted in classical music or pop music. By structure I mean: How is the piece structured? How are the individual parts strung together? There is hardly a song in bebop that doesn't begin and end with a theme. That happens less often with me. The pieces tend to develop from A to B, C, D and stop at E. These are structures that no longer come from the classical jazz era. But I can say where we borrow elements and ideas from. Our music is jazz because it contains the openness and spirit of jazz, it combines elements from this century as well as from the last.

Claus: What development do you see for the future, what is the line that is fun and where is your jazz journey going?

Jens: I have to constantly re-position myself and take a look: Who am I? What are the others doing? Where is it going? Who's shouting "right", who's shouting "left", what's going on right now? I am fully involved in this topic. The future will emerge from this.

Claus: Thank you very much for this detailed interview.

Musician portraits:

Jens Düppe, born in 1974 in Schwäbisch Gmünd (Germany), now living in Cologne, is classified as modern jazz with his drumming. After his first piano lessons, he took up the drums at the age of ten. He studied at the Franz Liszt University of Music in Weimar and from 1996 at the Conservatorium voor Muziek in Amsterdam, where he completed his Master's degree. He has received scholarships for residencies in New York City. In the mid-1990s, Jens Düppe was a member of the German Bundesjazzorchester. He played with Albert Mangelsdorff and Wolfgang Dauner in the German-French Jazz Ensemble. He has also played with Toots Thielemans, Ack van Rooyen, Markus Stockhausen, Charlie Mariano, Lee Konitz and the NDR and hr big bands, among others. In 2019 he received the WDR Jazz Prize (Improvisation).

Frederik Köster, born in Olsberg (Germany) in 1977, is a jazz trumpeter. He first studied school music in Detmold and then jazz trumpet and jazz composition and arrangement at the Cologne University of Music. From 2001 to 2005, he was a member of Peter Herbolzheimer's BundesJugendJazzOrchester and has been a professor of jazz trumpet at the Institute of Music at Osnabrück University of Applied Sciences since 2007. He has toured the world with various bands and has worked with Albert Mangelsdorff, Randy Brecker, Ack van Rooyen, Nina Hagen, Johannes Enders, Florian Weber, Michael Wollny, Nils Landgren, Nils Petter Molvær, Sportfreunde Stiller, Jazzkantine, the WDR Big Band Cologne, the hr-Bigband and the Peter Herbolzheimer Rhythm Combination & Brass. He has received numerous jazz awards.

Lars Duppler, born in Flensburg (Germany) in 1975, is a German-Icelandic jazz pianist and composer. He learned to play the piano as a child and studied at the Cologne University of Music. During his studies he was a member of the NRW Youth Jazz Orchestra and the European Youth Jazz Orchestra. He has played in the groups of Nils Wülker, Tom Gaebel, Eva Mayerhofer, Inga Lühning and Frank Sackenheim. With his band rætur (with Johannes Behr, Philipp Bardenberg and Jens Düppe) he presented Icelandic songs in fusion versions. In 2022 he released the duo album Hringferð and the trio album unbound with Stefan Karl Schmid, Denis Gäbel and Jens Düppe. Lars Duppler has been teaching jazz piano and ensemble at the Institute of Music at Osnabrück University of Applied Sciences since 2011.

Christian Ramond, born in Bonn (Germany) in 1962, is a jazz double bass player. He studied at the Cologne University of Music and subsequently received a scholarship from the Academy of Fine Arts in Banff, Canada. He plays in stylistically diverse music groups and has toured in various groups in more than 20 countries, e.g. New Zealand, Canada, Sudan, Egypt and Japan. He has been a member of the Theo Jörgensmann Freedom Trio since 2010. He played with Pilz, Klaus Kugel, Frank Paul Schubert and Reiner Winterschladen in the Yamabiko Quintet in 2022.

Translated with DeepL.com (free version)