BAUER 4 – FAMILY AFFAIRS

Music, so sovereign, so clear and convincingly placed in the room that one might believe all of this had been composed. It's not, and that's what makes it special. Bauer 4 proves to be an exciting, rather unusual cast for jazz without drums, and also as a "family affair". The three farmer brothers, Conny (born 1943 in Halle/Saale), Johannes (born 1954 in Halle/Saale) and Matthias (born 1959 in Thuringia) with the son of Conny Bauer, Louis Rastig, born in 1987, take off into the realms of improvised music, find and complement each one in the free game. So these 16 pieces were created: without prepared records, from the moment out and yet anything but unprecedented. The four speak a common musical language developed in a long process, passed on to each other and personally shaped. The two trombonists can complement each other ingeniously in their different playing style. What was practiced in the trombone duo or in the quartet double moppel with the two guitarists Uwe Kropinski and Helmut "Jo" Sachse is now realised differently and new. Conny, a master of melodic improvisation as well as the many-voiced sounds, and Johannes, who enter the realms of the freitonal advance, play the ideas to each other. Matthia's play reveals that he is as at home in contemporary new music as in musical improvisation. He never succumbs to the temptation to use the patterns of a jazz bassist. And yet, this quartet, which plays without drummers, unfolds not only an exciting dynamic, but a drive rooted in jazz. The Bauer Brothers grew up in a vicarage and consequently also with such music. Even as they progress together in unusual intervals and rhythms, something radiates through the beauty, the hymn and pathos of sacred music, emerge as if by themselves "intermediate melodies" with the aura of the magical. Bert Noglik