Günter Baby Sommer French Connection
16.09.2011
Günter Baby Sommer French Connection
Sylvain Kassap – as, ss, cl, bcl
Didier Levallet – db
Günter Baby Sommer – dr, perc
Lightness in improvised music is rare, but it is the strength of the French Connection. Drummer Günter Baby Sommers has been making music since the early eighties in association with the younger French, woodwind player Sylvain Kassap and double bass player Didier Levallet. This French Connection is one of the important groups that does not declare European jazz as a form of dissonant freedom, but cheerfully celebrates an imaginary folklore. An upbeat and lilting music.
His ringing and singing variety of percussion makes Sommer pulsate in a free flow of playing with Kassap’s catchy melodies and Levallet’s grounding bass lines in a pleasant French sensitive way.
And now a supplementary word for all those who do not yet know Baby, who is firmly rooted in Dresden:
Günter Baby Sommer is one of the most important representatives of contemporary European jazz, who has simultaneously developed an unmistakable musical language with a highly individualized set of percussion instruments.
His musical contributions to the most important jazz groups of the GDR, such as the Ernst-Ludwig-Petrowksy-Trio, the Zentralquartett and the Ulrich Gumpert Workshopband, enabled Sommer to enter the international scene. Thus, Sommer not only worked in trio with Wadada Leo Smith and Peter Kowald but met with such important players as Peter Brötzmann, Fred van Hove, Alexander von Schlippenbach, Evan Parker and Cecil Taylor. Sommer’s solo playing sensitized him to colloborations with writers such as Günter Grass.
Sommer’s discography includes some 100 recordings. As a professor at the Musikhochschule in Dresden, he influences the professional transmission of contemporary jazz to future generations.
The current geh8 exhibition with the promising name “Paradigmi”, which roughly speaking deals with fundamental world views of all kinds, already enjoyed an extremely enriching and above all sounding new position in the form of the concert by the two young musicians Pierre Borel and Joel Grip.
Since the opening of their exhibition, the exhibits have now been able to develop their full effect and grow both visibly and tangibly, even literally. With regard to the now upcoming and from us with excitement awaited concert, this development is once again mapped quite differently, because in addition to the young perspective of Borel & Grip now comes with the drummer Günter Baby Sommer and his French Connection also a decades-long matured position:
