Die Ablösung (displacement and rebonding) dares an excursion into the realm of classical modernity. Admittedly it´s not my intention to make a mark as interpreter of written music. It´s just an attempt to show the range of the possible with and through the instrument.
Concerning the lieder by Webern - for soprano voice and orchestra - I just used the lines for the singing voice.
The composition by Poulenc is threepart and therein the respective melodies are quite short: As is usual in Jazz I took them as the raw material for the impro­visations.

I get the impression that Die Ablösung is a little more virtuosic than its predecessors. And I hope, that this relative virtuosity is owed alone to the possi­bilities of expressing what I think musically, leaving no space for selfulfillment. Perhaps it there­fore is no coincidence that one won´t find any free improvisation or noisy piece here. When the means are available, does the need for unconditional free­dom - to begin here and now, so to say, at zero, even though it always was of course an illusion - ebb away or at least become weaker?

The Trois mouvements perpétuels are straight for­ward: no thought of dynamics got in my way, the boyish attitude with its embedded irony should be brought to full sound. The naivety of the theme be­guiled me. It was a stimulus to try something towards variation, that is to say to readopt parts of the theme. I also liked integrating the three movements into one longer piece and foreshadowing the following theme in the improvisational part of the previous movement. Therefore it became relatively long.

The mini-suite Voices ties in with the suite Zeitlos, each with Beckett as center; but also with the suite Sands by Steve Lacy which features Beckett´s po­ems from the Forties.* The haiku-like short po­ems at hand originate from a collection named Mirlitonnades - Beckett wrote them in the seventies -. My singing is of demo-nature. This little suite had its premiere in Ghent, with Irene Aebi and Jean-Jacques Avenel.
As regards content there is a connectedness be­tween the poems which I discovered only after I had made the selection.
Starting-point is the factuality: the horror increases, that is to say our planet isn´t really in good shape, to put it mildly. Given this confrontation with the status quo you ask yourself: whereto with the tension, the empathy, the depression, the anger, the power­less­ness etc.. A laugh steps out, of its own volition, it´s just like this and by no means cynical gallows humor but rather unpredicted, a little burst, it comes upon you.


Step

facing
the worst
till it
makes you laugh


Perhaps this laugh clears the space for something else, a space, which completes the poetical side of the carma: when you´ve overcome the state in which you visualize with fright the omnipresence of small talk, the dull babble: all the waves coming out of mobil phones which waft round the earth, a pollution of tremendous dimension, quasi the triumph of re­dundance; so when you have laughed hereupon, then there will be room for the image, that one word, one good word comes upon the next, that nothing disappears, that everything is there and stays, a wide plain with a lot of light and for the gaze cutting into a bend, this is very Buddhist. The poem could have almost sprung from Ryõkan or Basho.


Flap

listen to them
add up
words
upon words
without a word
steps
upon steps ceased
one by
one


Then even the end hardly got anything fearsome. Suddenly everything is gone and you won´t ever know: is it just me who disappears, is it the world, or is my perception defective?


Stroke

imagine if this
one day this
one nice day
imagine
if one day
one nice day this
ceased
imagine


This poem made me think of a novel I read not long ago: The Work of the Night by Thomas Glavinic, an Austrian. It´s about a man who wakes up one morning and, stepping out on to the street, wonders why everything is so quiet until he notices, that no one is left: The humans and even, as he finds out later, all living creatures are no longer there. Electricity still works, the wind is blowing, but apart from that he is alone. And this loneliness is overwhelming. You need to have a good portion of stoicism - which Beckett offers and diffuses again and again, together with a mellow catharsis, as the overall effect of his texts -. Finally a faint trace of coquetry: cessation comes with a wink, for it implies freedom which is literally boundless.
As for the titles: Voices. Beckett always heard voices. Sometimes they calm, sometimes they torture him. By dint of these voices which he passes on to the reader by some means or another, this cathartic effect arises, forms itself as quietly received insight, in which nothing is spared except a bad conscience, precisely because sentimentality is denied. So there will never be consolation through kitsch or cliché.
Instead, facing / the worst forms something like the call: Step straight ahead, face up to the fact, that we all cower on a sinking boat. Then laugh. What kind of laugh is this?
Or dream away, fly, flap, into the orbit of intellectual history.
Or use your imagination, while sitting in this boat, take a stroke, to see the image of nothing, a pause and then: nothing.

In The Denouement I like the contrast between the astringency of the composition and some airy mo­ments of the improvisation.

*Both suites you´ll find on the cd Il n´y rien à pleurer which is exclusively dedicated to Beckett.

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