The Way Joachim Kühn

• 1 Homogeneous Emotions 07:59
• 2 The Way 14:04
• 3 Go Sued 11:02
• 4 Supertonic 11:22
• Total Runtime 44:27

Info for The Way

Each new band in Joachim Kühn's creative career has marked a new departure for him, a broadening of his horizons. Now, in double bassist Thibault Cellier and drummer Sylvain Darrifourcq, the pianist has found two musicians with whom he can achieve the things that are important to him at this stage of his life, around his 80th birthday: to take a path which allows him even more freedom. Joachim Kühn describes playing with these two musicians, much younger than him, as making music "the French way, with lightness, speed and elegance". The three do this intuitively, almost without any need for discussion, but with a real feeling of urgency.

The backstory of the formation of the group is a matter of getting straight to the point. Joachim Kühn had been aware of Sylvain Darrifourcq’s playing for some time, notably from his years as the drummer in Émile Parisien's quartet, and also through some experiences of playing together. Kühn’s encounter with Thibault Cellier came about more by chance, in a hotel in Paris, but Joachim already had some familiarity with the bassist’s playing, notably from records by the group Novembre - Sylvain Darrifourcq the bassist plays alongside the bassist in their second album. Contacts were quickly set up, and within four months, the two Frenchmen were in the pianist's home studio in Ibiza, making music and recording as a trio, completely free of constraints. When Joachim Kühn heard the tapes a little later, he said: "That's how I want to sound now.” Or, quite simply, a band had been born.

Playing in a piano trio runs right through the pianist's oeuvre. Alongside solo piano, it is and remains the ultimate proving-ground for a pianist. With his first trio, formed in 1964 in his home town of Leipzig, Kühn made his ambition to break new ground very clear. In the years since he moved to Paris at the end of the 1960s, he has frequently worked with French musicians. Formed in 1974 and highly successful for two and a half decades, the trio with bassist Jean-François Jenny-Clark and drummer Daniel Humair demonstrated an innovative and totally interactive style of music that had never been heard before. Joachim Kühn calls the band "the trio of my life". But there were astonishing developments and discoveries after that as well: the trio with Moroccan guembri player Majid Bekkas and Spanish percussionist Ramón López successfully bridged the gap between jazz, European, African and Arabic cultures. And the New Trio with Chris Jennings and Eric Schaefer developed a style of playing with clear contours and a wide-open approach which never failed to fascinate.

In some ways, the new French Trio might seem to be a follow-on from the previous trio involving two musicians from the Francophone world, Jean-François Jenny-Clark and Daniel Humair. But history does not repeat itself. And free jazz, in Joachim Kühn’s sense of it, has long since outgrown its infancy. These days, the pianist says, it is just as much about freedom and the spontaneous creation of structures. And also, as with all of the very great role models, especially in their later creative phases – Bach, Coltrane, Ornette Coleman and Joachim's late elder brother Rolf Kühn – it is about finding the way that leads straight to the essential, to the heart of things. And into the open.

Joachim Kühn, piano
Thibault Cellier, double bass
Sylvain Darrifourcq, drums

Produced by Joachim Kühn

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