1988 Just Music
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More or less regularly FMP invites friends interested in improvisation up to the Wedding district of West Berlin, where, under the Logo "Just Music", it presents concerts in its own recording studio, located at Koloniestraße 133. Normally occurring on four successive evenings, "Just Piano" is a series of closed concerts focusing on different aspects of piano playing. During this festival, each guest pianist performs twice, rotating turns at the keyboard with his or her colleagues; judicious programming guarantees some quite startling contrasts and juxtapositions. As early as 1984, FMP was able to test the "Just Music - Just Piano" format in the much larger setting of Berlin's Quartier Latin; there, over a period of three days, sixteen pianists performing on three concert-grand’s treated listeners to a veritable, practically non-stop feast of piano music, with the presentations varying from solo performances to an ensemble piece by Fred Van Hove scored for all sixteen participants. By comparison with the Quartier, the much smaller FMP studio in Wedding may seem downright tiny. Certainly the more intimate conditions there have led us to adopt another, perhaps more vivid programming philosophy: Sitting in close proximity to the keyboard, listeners have an in-depth chance to study how outstanding pianists representing different styles and traditions deal, each in his or her own personal way, with that contraption we call a "piano" . In planning these concerts, the key words are variety and diversity, to which end we rotate the artists so as to allow, as Jost Gebers puts it, "someone working almost exclusively with clusters to appear next to someone utilizing sparser, more relaxed, perhaps more tonal elements". In addition, as the name "Just Music - Just Piano" implies, the series is not limited to improvised music. This year's roster does include musicians like Irène Schweizer, who advocate a purely improvised approach; but there'll be others, like the Japanese Aki Takase, who'll play a mixture of improvised and notated pieces; still others, such as Alex Schlippenbach, are themselves composers (who also write for other instruments besides the piano). In contrast to last year, when the first "Just Piano" festival presented six pianists from very different backgrounds, this year's artists share quite a bit in common. Joining Irène Schweizer, Aki Takase and Alex Schlippenbach for the 1988 festival, scheduled from Good Friday to Easter Monday, will be: Howard Riley (England), Per Henrik Wallin (Sweden), and Hermann Keller (German Democratic Republic). Keller's music stems from the New Music tradition: an avowed composer of notated pieces, he emphasizes: "I'm not a jazz musician; nor do I intend to become one." In his works for the group he and the saxophonist Manfred Schulze co-founded, the Berlin Improvisation Quartet, Keller made an important cross disciplinary contribution during the 1970's; Keller's colleague, Schulze, will perform on the "Just Music - Just Horns", and his work is described in the section of this booklet devoted to that series. Translation: Daniel Werts from: Booklet “improvised music” by Free Music Production (FMP), 1988 |
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