Theo Jorgensmann & Albrecht Maurer - Duo Melencolia

20 years of collaboration as a duo. Theo Jörgensmann and Albrecht Maurer met 1992 in a broadcasting project of Deutschlandfunk by the German/Spanish composer Maria de Alvear. Shortly afterwoods Theo Jörgensmann founded his Werkschau Ensemble, a quintet featuring Donja Djember on cello, Rainald Schückens on bass clarinet, Achim Krämer on drums and Albrecht Maurer on violin. This group played on many festivals, did radio productions and released a CD on Konnex Records. It was a leading group in Germany in the early nineties combining jazz, chamber music and free improvisation with a unique sound. At that time Jörgensmann and Maurer did a lot of duo improvisations, the „ground work“ for their further collaboration.Simultaneously they worked together in groups with Eckard Koltermann, Ludger Schmidt, Lauren Newton, Eric Boeren, Wolter Wierbos, Ernst Glerum, and others. In 1999 Jörgensmann and Maurer met again as musical directors for a series of concerts organized by the Department for Cultur of Bayer Leverkusen. They performed and recorded in a quartet with Barre Phillips and Denis Collin and in a quintet with Bobo Stenson, Kent Carter and Klaus Kugel. In the next years they focussed on their own goups, Jörgensmann started his Jörgensmann Quartet and later the trio Oles Jörgensmann Oles while Maurer worked with his group Trio Delight, the Kent Carter String Trio and since 2005 with Ensemble Dialogos (Early Musik). In 2007 Jörgensmann invited Maurer to play with the Oles brothers and himself touring Germany and Poland. In 2008 Maurer called Jörgensmann after he had worked with Peter Jacquemyn, thinking that he is the right partner for a new trio called Trio Hot with a complex sound by using the voice as extended techniques like multiphonics of brass instruments. (CD Jink Nemu 008), 2009 they performed together in the Revière Composers´Pool (3 CD Box on Emanem). In spring 2011 Jörgensmann invited Maurer to do this duo album, they recorded like Miles Davis used to do in the fifties „just one take“. In that way they found the lightness of melancholia and left the studio two hours after coming. Finally for their twenties stage anniversary in 2012 Theo Jörgensmann and Albrecht Maurer travel for the first time with a duo release in their luggage. bios Theo Jörgensmann belongs to the second generation of European free jazz musicians. Theo Jörgensmann is one of the most advanced modern free improvisers on his instrument, combining moody chamber jazz with hints of a modal hard bop sensibility.

He was part of the clarinet Renaissance in the jazz and improvising music scene. Jörgensmann is one of a few clarinet players for whom unaccompanied solo recordings are a significant part of his work. During a career spanning three decades as a free improviser Jörgensmann has worked with (among many others) Mike Richmond, Barre Phillips, Kent Carter, John Lindberg, Charlie Mariano, Wilbur Morris, Eric Vloeimans, Jeanne Lee, John Fischer, Vincent Chancey, Kenny Wheeler, Paul McCandless and Lee Konitz. „To find the right balance between communication of motion and non- communication is the major part of improvised music; that communication of motion as a part of interaction in music is an opportunity to create a new structure of time, which the listener could perceive as a new kind of musical space; that the idea of jazz does not depend on a specific material and special form; that the essential aspect of jazz is the fact that jazz musicians discovered the fourth dimension of time in music.“ Albrecht Maurer studied violin and three semester viola at the Musikhochschule Köln. In addition, he pursued the study of non- European tonal systems and computer music with Johannes Fritsch und Klarenz Barlow. In the eighties Albrecht Maurer mainly played jazz fusion on synthesizers, violin and voice, while studying classical music. In the early nineties he began to focus on expanding and reinventing the violin‘s musical place: his works are characterized by sounds and loops, a broad timbral spectrum, percussive imitations and grooves all in combination with the energy of jazz and a classical technique. In 2002 Maurer bought a medieval fiddle to feel the early history of string playing. In 2008 he started to add his voice as a sound-extension and to play viola. He has worked with many jazz musicians including Kent Carter, Wolter Wierbos, Benoît Delbecq, Bobo Stenson, Norbert Stein, Klaus Kugel, Charlie Mariano, Karl Berger, Steve Argüelles, Barre Phillips, Carla Bley, Peter Jacquemyn, Lucian Ban and John Hébert. On medieval instruments he plays with Katarina Livljanic and Norbert Rodenkirchen.