About the concert
Simón Willson (double bass), Benedikt Jäckel (saxophone), Jonas Esser (drums), Paul Janoschka (piano)
Simón Willson’s debut album “Good Company” will be released at the end of 2023 on the prestigious label FreshSoundNewTalent. In the New Yorker, Simón Willson is one of the most sought-after bassists on the jazz scene and plays daily concerts in the most prestigious clubs with musicians such as Ethan Iverson, Gilad Hekselman, Nasheet Waits, Dave Douglas etc.
In the foreground of his music is the relationship between the acknowledged and the new, a relationship in which the new is defined against what has already established itself, while at the same time the established is reconfigured in response to the new. Where do the influences stop and where does one’s own begin? How close or how far are these opposites? Where does the fellow musician end within a band context and where does the individual musician begin? Simon Willson lives for these blurred and approximate boundaries that seem impossible to define.
The old and the new, looseness and tightness, intuition and intellect, maximalism and minimalism, freedom and structure, composition and improvisation, rawness and sophistication, order and chaos dance together in Willson’s music. Sometimes the musical concept only seems like a flickering light, almost extinguished and close to the void, then again a concrete, meticulously elaborated plan, which rises in interaction with the musicians Benedikt Jäckle on the saxophone, Paul Janoschka on the piano and Jonas Esser on the drums from the beginning to the end.
The 4 musicians met in New York City and quickly found each other on a musical as well as on a personal level.
+ “Composer Willson is a serious bassist with all the right influences” - Ethan Iverson +“Simon’s rambunctious rhythm, drama, energy, and intensity on the bass can really create a spell - MacArthur recipient and pianist Ran Blake +“Bassist Simón Willson’s Quartet is a diversely contemporary amalgamation of leftfield New York jazz, progressive bop, abstract classical and post-rock minimalism” - Jazz Wise Magazine