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KONTRABASSDUO: STUDER /FREY  - Zip

Leo RecordSsCD LR 891

Peter K Frey, Double bass; Daniel Studer, Double bass
Recorded April 2019 at the Kronen Galerie, Zurich, Switzerland

These recordings were made at a series of ten, half-hour concerts, to mark the 20th anniversary of their coming together.  The intimacy of the gallery and its accompanying exhibits of ceramics and paintings, seem to create what might be the ideal setting for such an empathetic coming together from which utterly spontaneous concepts are bred.  Such improvisation is, I think, both emotional and intellectual and such sophistry is enabled too by the eloquent potential of the instruments themselves.

Peter Frey is a Swiss bass player and sound artist who started with piano lessons before the bass, and was playing with bands from 1972.  He worked as a programmer before becoming a professional musician and now works with double bass and voice as a freely improvising performer and teacher.

Daniel Studer is a Master of Arts in Music Pedagogy.  He has studied composition and is a guest composer at the Elektronisches Studio in Basel.  His particular interests are improvisation along with composition and improvisation together in blended arrangements.  He has played with many noted musicians, among them Lester Bowie, Steve Grossmann, Gerry Hemingway, Barney Kessel, Kirk Lightsey, Don Moye and Evan Parker and is regularly featured at festivals.  He has been teaching at the Bern University of the Arts and at other music schools since 2006.

I found that, as with much improv music, my complete sensory apparatus, as might be involved in the reception and translation of any corporeal stimuli, was at work here, picking up and trailing, spiralling and lunging through many rhythms, harmonies and congruences, as they made their appearances.  The music, the improv, vary capriciously but naturally, and the air of freedom is transparent.  Empathy is in the air, along with a host of unusual sounds from these richly sonorous instruments. 

Reviewed by Ken Cheetham

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