Jazz Articles about Zentralquartett

About Zentralquartett

Album Review

Zentralquartett / Synopsis: Auf Der Elbe Schwimmt Ein Rosa Krokodil

Read "Auf Der Elbe Schwimmt Ein Rosa Krokodil" reviewed by Nic Jones

by Nic Jones
May 26, 2008

This is a reissue of music recorded in March of 1974 and first released by the FMP label in 1976. The decades haven't diminished its fire and the fact that the group has reconvened and recorded occasionally through the years since marks this as the first document of an ongoing story.

Communal improvisation is the order of the day, but echoes of New Orleans polyphony are very distant. Instead there's restlessly creative music of a radically ...

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Album Review

Zentralquartett: 11 Songs - Aus Teutschen Landen

Read "11 Songs - Aus Teutschen Landen" reviewed by Derek Taylor

by Derek Taylor
March 21, 2006

Attention to tradition is too often mistaken as adherence to conservative orthodoxy. In jazz, the culpability often rests at the feet of the neo-conservative crowd, a frequently demonized assembly whose stock rises and falls with regularity, depending on the body of listeners polled.

The four players who form the Zentralquartett have little time for such meta-musical squabbling. They're too busy making music that stretches the malleable and porous boundaries of improvised music to their own highly listenable designs. Like Albert ...