Home » Jazz Musicians » Jürg Solothurnmann

Jürg Solothurnmann

Jürg Solothurnmann (b. 1943) grew up in Solothurn, Switzerland, and studied musicology, ethnomusicology, modern history, journalism and jazz at the University of Bern, the Swiss Jazz School and the Indiana University Bloomington IN. His most influential teachers were the composer Sandor Veress ,the jazz educator David N. Baker and the ethnomusicologist George List. In his childhood and youth, he played several instruments – accordion (folk music), piano) (classical and jazz, five–string banjo (American folk), marching drums, etc., and finally, tenor saxophone, which he learned largely self–taught. Season CoverAlready as a student, he worked also as a music journalist and concert promoter, and became ultimately up to 2008 a part–time music editor at the Swiss Radio DRS. From the 1970s, he played with groups in the styles of postbop, blues and Afro–Latin music, and developed gradually to free jazz and then to free improvisation. He always loved the meeting with flexible improvisers with various cultural backgrounds.

Since the 1980s, he worked with musicians from Switzerland, Europe, the USA and the Orient, and dancers, performers, poets, filmmakers, painters, etc. – For his achievements as a musician, radio producer, journalist, organizer, lecturer, founder of a CD label and music trade unionist, he was awarded several cultural prizes. His Music

His own contemporary style often develops in the large intermediate zones between different mentalities, cultures and styles. His projects and ensembles integrate and transform a wide range of musical approaches – from folklore imaginaire to speechlike or sparse, pointillist events. He is fascinated in particular by the myriad uses of the human voice in world and experimental music.

Solothurnmann loves to build bridges, and also plays with musicians from Africa and Asia. Between jazz and unidiomatic improvisation, and his current projects are influenced also by new music and ethnic styles. Moreover, he loves meeting with representatives of other art media such as poetry, slam poetry, dance, performance art, theater, painting, video and film. He is currently working with "In Transit" featuring M.J.Stevens, Potage du Jour with Franziska and Christoph Baumann, Raw & Cooked with Michel Wintsch und Christian Wolfarth, the quartet Next and Evan Parker & September Winds.

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298
Album Review

Evan Parker: September Winds

Read "September Winds" reviewed by Richton Guy Thomas


Evan Parker is among Europe's most innovative and intriguing saxophonists. Parker's solos and playing style are distinguished by his creative use of circular breathing and false fingering. He's one of the few players not only willing but anxious to demonstrate his affinity for late-period of John Coltrane. September Winds was recorded in an empty water reservoir on the Zürichberg (which is located in Zurich, Switzerland)...built in 1922 and standing empty for nearly thirty years. The acoustics are ...

81
Album Review

Anliker-Parker-Schmid-Senn-Solothurnmann: September Winds

Read "September Winds" reviewed by John Eyles


In 1999, a series of concerts took place in an abandoned underground drinking water cistern near Zurich, build in 1922. Performances from that series were released on Vollmond on Creative Works Records. A second series of concerts was planned for September 2000, but fire regulations stopped them taking place. Instead, a series of recording sessions took place in the cistern, over three days. This record and its companion piece September Duos are the result. [ Winds has trombone plus four ...

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Music

Recordings: As Leader | As Sideperson

September Winds

Creative Works Records
2003

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