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In the last two decades Austria has
brought forward a diversity of talents and a number of considerable
jazz musicans which have generated an extremely lively representative
Jazzscene in the whole of Europe.
Four of these exeptional talents have gathered around the trumpet
player and longtime member of the Vienna Art Orchester, Karl
"Bumi" Fian, born 1960, to form a quintet:
The saxophone player Clemens Salesny,
student of Klaus Dickbauer and inspite of his youth ( born 1980)
involved in various projects with artists from Eddie Henderson,
Joe Zawinul, Thomas Gansch to Sabina Hank. Pianist and keyboarder
Clemens ”Bumpfi” Wenger,
born in 1982 and busy oscillating between avand garde (Renald
Deppe, Max Nagl), Jazz and popular music (Ausseer Hardbradler).
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photo: Rainer Rygalyk |
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Thomas Froschauer,
equally native to Lower Austria as Salesny and Wenger, experienced
in Big Bands and equally valued by Jazz greats such as Puschnig,
Scherer and Radovan as well as the Austro-Rock musican Andy
Lee Lang.
And finally Bernhard Osanna, doublebass
player, born in 1972 almost the "senior", and also
collegue of Jeff Hamilton, Bill Holman, Flip Philips or Hans
Salomon.
This Clemens Salesny–Bumi Fian Quintet is in perfect command
of the musical language of contemporary Jazz: extended, modal
harmonics, complicated often somewhat tricky lines, breaking
up of form, improvisations of great interval jumps, changes
of pace, dissonance as stylistic tool, microtonal effects and
much more, which since has all belonged to Ornette Coleman's,
Eric Dolphy's and Charles Mingus's palette of expression in
Modern Jazz. Conventional cliches lack in the quintet's music
thank god as well as the indulgence in trendy contemporary currents.
Instead there are well used up improvisational free spaces,
plurality in tonality, blues connections (Fian!) and occasional
flair for drama.
What once schocked as a revolutionary innovation has been transformed
by those five musicans into the 21st century in a relaxed manner,
lightness and implicitness, whereby especially Salesny's compositions,
which form most of the eight titles – following the genius
of Charles Mingus which feature a lot of melodic and formal
autonomy and character. Also the arrangements of the two compositions
("Epistrophy"and "Misterioso")
by Theolonious Monk, another "genius of modern music",
reveal originality and wealth of ideas.
"ALWAYS
BLUE" and the Clemens Salesny–Bumi
Fian Quintet are a further brilliant document for the
artistic potential of "Jazz Made in Austria".
Klaus Schulz |
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