Dejan Terzic’s Quartet Melanoia has always been a fount of empathy become sound. Four musicians – saxophonist Hayden Chisholm, pianist Achim Kaufmann, guitarist Ronny Graupe and drummer Dejan Terzic – who unfold jazz from the other side. The premise is mutual listening, catching each other, and responding to each other. Against this background solos never sound like solos, but are always part of a spontaneous or calculated composition. The borders of the moment open up, with those of other moments in a chain of unavoidable impulses toward a living process. Making music without vanity: four individual voices which in this context are derived from the togetherness of Us.

 

Of course, all these claims could be made by any other jazz formation, but Melanoia manages not only without empty phrases and slogans but also without the usual jazz reflexes. The result is an extremely gentle music, which is immediately incorporated into the sound mass of the listener’s emotional consciousness. Because bandleader Dejan Terzic allows feelings to come through. It is never about originality, but always rather authenticity. The original, the unique, is derived, as it were, automatically.

 

Melanoia is a group of storytellers. In contemporary jazz this is an extreme rarity. For their new stories they have been looking for a new public. “For a long time now I’ve had the idea of making music with a string quartet,” says the drummer. “I met the musicians of the Quatuor iXi, and my contact with them became more intense. In Bern I met the young, very talented composer Luzia von Wyl, and I found the idea of working with an external composer interesting. The music she wrote for us was tailor-made. The condition was that it had to leave plenty of space for improvisation. I knew the music of Quatuor iXi, but I didn’t know what had been written, and what was improvised. Then when they began to improvise in the rehearsals, my jaw dropped. I hadn’t heard anything like it before.”

 

The Quatuor iXi is made up of violinists Régis Huby and Théo Ceccaldi, violist Guillaume Roy and cellist Atsushi Sakai. The name iXi stands for interpretation through improvisation. The four string players know their way around jazz, and have an utterly direct access not only to improvisation, but also to playing with the nuances, the mood, and the solid state of the moment. While Melanoia provides the colours and surfaces, the Quatuor iXi takes care of the contours and shadings. And yet at no point are these roles rigidly distributed, but here they flow together into a watercolour, where they are turned completely upside down.
(from the booklet text by Wolf Kampmann)

 

The recording was produced by Peter Buerli for Radio SRF 2 Kultur
Recorded at Bauer Studios, Ludwigsburg on 1-2, March, 2015
Sound engineer: Johannes Wohlleben
Edited by Martin Ruch
Mixed by Johannes Wohlleben at Bauer Studio
Mastered by Viktor Szabó at BMC Studio, Budapest