Jazz Articles about Ben Zahler

Ben Zahler's Songgoing: Quietly Cold

by Chris Mosey
December 1, 2018

Swiss flautist Ben Zahler names his principal influences as Herbie Mann and Eric Dolphy. Having said that, he immediately backtracks. Mann was too commercial, Dolphy too experimental. Zahler positions himself somewhere between the two. He strives to avoid the “streamlined sluggishness" of Mann and similarly has no truck with way-out, overblowing excess a la Dolphy. In very Swiss fashion, he takes a neutral standpoint though--as the sleeve note to the album by Swiss journalist Steff Rohrbach, of ...