Translation of the German Review:

The composer and pianist Patrick Bebelaar was born in Trier (Germany) in March 1971. His music, which incorporates elements of world and free jazz, has earned him an outstanding reputation. He studied at the Stuttgart University of Music and Performing Arts from 1993, where he held a teaching position from 2006 to 2012. He has been a lecturer for jazz/pop at the University of Church Music in Tübingen since 2013, held the position of Vice Rector from 2014 and was appointed Professor in 2018. He has worked with Michel Godard, Herbert Joos, Johannes Enders, Wolfgang Puschnig, Fried Dähn, Ulrich Süße and Vincent Klink, among others. His tours have taken him to Europe, North America, India, and South Africa. Since 2000, he has been working as a volunteer in the townships there, teaching young people in various projects and making music with them. He teaches at the universities of Kwazulu Natal and Cape Town. Patrick Bebelaar has received many prizes and awards for his piano playing, his commitment and his albums.

"How Insentisive" is a great album. The pianist's skill and virtuosity enrich the work, which is peppered with musical highlights. There are quieter phases with a clear melodic line, alternating with stirring passages in which the pianist plays in a freer style. There is a great wealth of ideas within the tracks. The artistic level meets the highest standards, as can be heard, for example, in the breathtakingly played piece "Tango", composed by Patrick Bebelaar himself. Dominique Klatte (Jazz on Vinyl) has succeeded in recording the grand piano perfectly. The piano work is thus transferred to the listening room in all clarity and with every nuance. The music comes from the famous "black room".

Conclusion: An album characterized by lightness and at the same time great depth with impressions of world music! This sensational piece of recording and piano art is a great enrichment for the music scene. A great moment for the audio tape!

In January 2024, I conducted an interview with Patrick Bebelaar:

Claus: I read that your music contains elements of free jazz and world jazz. How would you describe your style?

Patrick: Musically speaking, I would describe my style as a storyteller. Stories that can also be exotic, i.e. not from my home country. The roots in European music and classical music can be heard again and again because of the way I play the piano. But there are always exotic settings. These are world music and world jazz, e.g. giving a little hint of Argentina with the tango. At the same time, there are tensions where everything explodes in the music, there is a hint of free jazz. But basically, my music contains everything that has crossed my musical path. These can be elements from pop music and classical music or folklore from the parts of the world where I have spent time or had contacts. It's the nature and genesis of jazz: everything flows into and with each other. Everything has the improvisational approach of jazz. That's what cements the whole thing together and holds it together so that it doesn't come across as a potpourri, but as unified music. My album has the phrasing and articulation of jazz. I hope you can hear the spontaneity with which the music was created in the recording. Yes, it's jazz, that's where I feel most at home.

Claus: To be able to deliver this high quality, you certainly have to be at one with your instrument...

Patrick: ...that's my way of playing the piano, my personal way of dealing with the instrument and with the music: To leave a unified musical image. It's always a shared journey between me, the instrument and the listener or audience. I see my relationship with the instrument as a partnership. If you see what the artist does with the title, with the instrument, with the music, as a partnership, then it doesn't just live from the fact that it's always beautiful (although that should be the main thing), then there are passionate moments. The more you've lived together, the more intense the connection becomes. I think it's the same in music. That's my approach when I make music.

Claus: You have reworked some well-known songs so extensively and created pieces from them that the original is hardly recognizable. Do these compositions provide the framework and do you build something new on top of them?

Patrick: There are various possibilities. On the album, for example, there is "My One And Only Love", where the structure is simple and easy to recognize. The approach was that I wanted to convey this beautiful melody as plainly and simply as possible. In my version, the piece has become rather simpler, but there is still enough friction with the improvisation and the way of harmonizing to keep the piece exciting and interesting. Then there is another piece such as "How Insensitive", a fairly simple bossa nova by Antônio Carlos Jobim. It appealed to me less from the composition than from the lyrics, the meaning of which is a "reverse love song", because someone wants to make it clear to someone else that s/he is not in love with them, knowing full well that the other person is in love with them. How do you do that without going out afterwards and saying: what an insensitive idiot I am? Couldn't that have been done in a friendlier, nicer or gentler way? Then I played this beautiful melody and improvised over it. There's the middle section, which reflects the undiplomatic moment in the narrative of the text, which makes you angry afterwards: My goodness, couldn't you have done that more sensitively? With its confusion, this part is clearly in the direction of free jazz. Nevertheless, you can always sense the melody running in the background, because: In all this chaos, this person who is angry remains the same.

Claus: So that means that you dare to make somewhat sprawling excursions that extend into free jazz and keep the listener interested with the melody lines, or you welcome them away again. What differences do you see when listening to a recording compared to a concert?

Patrick: Audiences have listening habits. That's why I tend to be careful with recordings with extensive jazz elements, because: People go to a concert, listen to the artist and are fully involved. If you put on a CD or stream music, to name the most horrible way of consuming music, then you might be cooking, vacuuming or driving at the same time, then access to this type of music is lost. You would no longer perceive a leitmotif within the aforementioned "chaos". You can do other things live because the listeners are fully concentrated on the musician and the music. In private, however, music is often only consumed in the background and often nothing can be done with concerts except that they are an event. For other people, like me for example, this means that I no longer listen to music at all when I'm driving because I can't listen to enough. So I only listen to audio books or "Deutschlandfunk" in the car, which is mainly talk radio. At home, I only listen to music when I'm really quiet and need to sit down. The typical record and audiotape consumer loves their medium simply because it involves so much "on the spot". You have to clean the record or put the tape in. It's a ceremony beforehand that prepares you for the next 30 or 40 minutes. Then you press the play button, sit down and listen to it. You don't go into the kitchen and start washing up, drying up or frying an egg. People often struggle with the demands of what's coming at them musically, which could be because they're not used to it. But I also believe that they can't get involved because they can't get out of their everyday lives. It would be the same problem, for example, if you went to a very good restaurant: you have to get involved with the food so that it works. The food comes at you and is different from what you normally eat at home. A big part of the trick with people is that they dress up and dress differently when they go to a restaurant or the theater, for example. Artists do that too. They wear different clothes on stage than they do at home in order to have a different attitude: 'Now I stand up straighter, I go out, I'm focused, I get involved in something and forget about the rest that's been bothering me throughout the day. There are many of these rituals. It's like the ceremony of putting on a record or a tape.

Claus: You teach young people in South Africa and make music with them. As someone who is rooted in the music culture of the northern hemisphere, how can I imagine these projects?

Patrick: I went to South Africa for the first time as a student on a scholarship, fell in love with the country and the mentality of the people and felt very much at home. What kept me coming back were the music projects with the kids and young people in the townships. From the very first moment, they saw something different in me than a white South African. I can't say why. I think you can sense where and how someone is socialized, the way they treat each other, the way they approach people. I was able to tell them things that I'm sure white teachers in South Africa would also tell them, but which they wouldn't accept from them. I also really enjoyed it because my teaching input was incredibly valued. When you teach young people here, you have to fight for them to practise or to listen. It was a good situation for both sides. I kept taking colleagues with me and inspiring them with this mentality. They were all enthusiastic too. The other point: I also make music with people who are culturally further away, for example with Indian musicians and play concerts with them. All over the world, people make music to express what they can't say with words. Be it a love song or a ritual, for example, when it comes to grief, where music plays a huge role. For things that cannot be expressed emotionally in words, music is the more direct communication factor. In this respect, you can always get together with musicians anywhere and make music. There is the pop song by Sting "The Russians Love Their Children Too". That's an example of the emotional level on which you can come together despite all the differences because parents love their children all over the world. Everywhere people mourn other people and everywhere people fall in love with each other: you can always come together emotionally. Music is a great tool for this.

Claus: What role does cultural appropriation play in this?

Patrick: Music has developed from cultural appropriation. Jazz came about because one group appropriated the culture of another and socialization was reinterpreted. That's how classical music, European music, all music came about. This is also how all progress is made, including in technique. As an electronics engineer, for example, you acquire the knowledge of other people and build on it with your own ideas. If I don't take other people's developments as a basis, if I don't make use of them, then there is no further development. If a European tries to imitate Indian music, that is perhaps cultural appropriation. If someone tries to play just like me, that is also cultural appropriation. But that is usually irrelevant. When we learn languages, that is cultural appropriation, because language is culture! If that doesn't work, I can still make music with them and talk to them that way. Music and culture are nothing other than language.

Claus: What was the recording situation with Dominique Klatte like for you? Did you record the album in one take?

Patrick: We recorded in Schwäbisch Hall in a former church. I know and like the room and the grand piano and also the town. The nice thing was that I went there the day before and took my time. I didn't want any stress. The grand piano was tuned and already miked. Dominique also knew the room and the piano very well and knew what to look out for. That helped immensely. There was no sound check before we started. Everything was perfectly prepared and started in the morning with full concentration. I was also very well prepared and knew how I had to imagine the tape recording for a record production, including the order of the tracks. The recording went very well without a break. I had to record a few pieces a second time. It was simply a relaxed way of working.

Claus: There are musicians who show little interest in the product after a recording. It's different with you. What are the special features of an analog tape recording for you?

Patrick: The quality of the sound, i.e. Dominique's work, but also the quality of the music-making, is preserved in a tape recording. As a consumer, you get the highest possible quality on tape. You hear and feel that you are closest to the music. Artists often have the feeling that if they are not sitting at the instrument themselves, everything else is second-rate. They do want it to sound as close and good as possible, but basically the only real thing is to be live on stage. As a consumer, you have invested a sum of money in the tape and you want to get involved with it. That's what tape stands for to me. There are more and more people who are returning to the possibilities of experiencing things more intensively. Streaming is definitely the least intense way to experience high-quality music. There is often no order anymore, which is also part of a good recording. The artist has thought about how the arc should be drawn from the first to the last piece. If this is lost, you only get a fraction of what was originally conceived, composed and recorded. That is extremely sad. Tape is the best form of quality. It is the most unadulterated sound and at the same time the temporal experience of the music is the most limited. The tape is shorter than the LP, the LP is shorter than the CD. A stream is infinite as long as you have internet. This means that someone takes the most time with a tape, concentrates the most in order to perceive this smallest moment of time most intensely. That's the great thing about tapes and the people who listen to them. Robert Schumann published the "Neue Zeitschrift für Musik" in 1834 and said: "If you want to judge a piece of music, you have to listen to it at least three times." I can remember when digital music first came out and I was teaching at the university in Stuttgart. A student had transferred his hard disk to me. An analysis showed that this playlist would take 17 years, 325 days, 16 hours, 25 minutes and 17 seconds. What do I get out of it? I can only play everything briefly, never listen to anything twice. Many young people don't have the experience we used to have when we bought a record once a month, for example. You didn't have anything else. With people who had the same taste, you might have swapped them or recorded a cassette. You always listened to the whole album. The fourth track wasn't special and you didn't want to get up, so you listened to it three or four times and realized: It was totally cool, you didn't understand that at first. The longer you have the opportunity to listen to music endlessly, the less you listen to music twice or three times, the less you can get into it and understand what's going on and get to know new things.

Claus: What is your conclusion?

Patrick: For me, the important thing is that life, humanity, culture and music can only move forward if we get involved in something new. If we've only ever done what we've always done and deny and reject everything that's different, we're at a standstill, which, biologically speaking, means death. Genetically, it is the same. If we want to develop further, we have to learn from each other worldwide and reject any mechanisms of isolation.

Claus: Thank you very much for this detailed interview.

Translated with DeepL.com (free version)