PARTICIPANTS (berlin)
piano
Many improvisers regard themselves as 'composing in real-time', but Niko is the genuine article. Lauded with multiple awards for his work in providing music for dance, radio and theater, he has a refined sensitivity to drama and movement. As an improviser, he is a dream to play with, consistently finding the perfect balance between self-assertion and support and encouragement. Niko has that rare ability to make perfect sense of the contributions of his collaborators, consistently delivering an articulate response that advances the flow of the music.
photo: Guido Castagnoli
alto saxophone
Even as a small child Anna preferred to make sounds with toy instruments... perhaps it was a sign of things to come. She is the ultimate natural communicator, switching organically between supporting others, and foregrounding her own uniquely spiky and angular style of jazz. The slogan that she follows is: 'to be prepared for the unprepared', and she executes this to perfection, never overly dominant, but always primed to respond instantly, ready to enter into a dialogue with her fellow musicians. If music is a language, then Anna is the consummate wordsmith.
photo: Manuel Miethe
clarinet, spoken word
To British clarinetist, Noel Taylor, Berlin is right in the center of the worldwide explosion in experimental and improvised music. Although living in Portugal, he has many 'connections' to Berlin, having often played there. He loves the flamboyance which permeates the spirit of Berlin and its many musicians, and is certain that the city would provide a fecund location for this, the second edition of 'Only Connect'.
photo: Nuno Rocha (cropped)
trumpet
Is Nikolaus Neuser quite as cerebral as this photo suggests? Certainly, he can adopt multiple disguises from one moment to the next, changing from tonality to pure texture at will. There is, however, an underlying lyricism to his playing which is never far from the surface. Perhaps the secret of his sensibility is the heightened awareness of the overlapping fields of free improvisation, contemporary music and avant-jazz, and his ability to position himself precisely within this matrix, never loosing awareness of which segment of the overlap that he has strayed into.
photo: Manuel Miethe
voice, spoken word
Turkish singer, Cansu Tanrikulu, is a live-wire performer, whose appetite for exploration is almost as large as her range of talents. Whether it be casually rattling off fluid bebop phrases, weirdly dislocated pop in the band 'Meow', jazz standards, or the wilder shores of free improvisation, Cansu approaches each situation with the same unbounded energy. Her undoubted stardust has attracted the attention of stellar company, leading to collaborations with such internationally recognised artists as Jim Black, William Parker, and guitarist, Marc Ribot, among others.
photo: Dovile Sermokas
proposal
'Only Connect' previously happened in Lisbon, and we propose to repeat the event in Berlin with other musicians. In Lisbon we found that the very simple rule of not playing while you were seated, opened up a large range of performative possibilities. Not only did this result in solos, duos, trios forming organically, but the musicians themselves felt empowered to explore the intrinsic drama of the performance context, their spacial relationships to one another, and their relationship to the audience itself. We require a minimum rehearsal period of 4 hours in the space itself, in order to arrange the space and to crystallize and explore our ideas.