Jürg Solothurnmann

Jürg Solothurnmann (b. 1943) grew up in Solothurn, Switzerland, and studied musicology, ethnomusicology, modern history, journalism and jazz at the University of Bern, the Swiss Jazz School and the Indiana University Bloomington IN. His most influential teachers were the composer Sandor Veress ,the jazz educator David N. Baker and the ethnomusicologist George List. In his childhood and youth, he played several instruments – accordion (folk music), piano) (classical and jazz, five–string banjo (American folk), marching drums, etc., and finally, tenor saxophone, which he learned largely self–taught. Season CoverAlready as a student, he worked also as a music journalist and concert promoter, and became ultimately up to 2008 a part–time music editor at the Swiss Radio DRS. From the 1970s, he played with groups in the styles of postbop, blues and Afro–Latin music, and developed gradually to free jazz and then to free improvisation. He always loved the meeting with flexible improvisers with various cultural backgrounds.

Since the 1980s, he worked with musicians from Switzerland, Europe, the USA and the Orient, and dancers, performers, poets, filmmakers, painters, etc. – For his achievements as a musician, radio producer, journalist, organizer, lecturer, founder of a CD label and music trade unionist, he was awarded several cultural prizes. His Music

His own contemporary style often develops in the large intermediate zones between different mentalities, cultures and styles. His projects and ensembles integrate and transform a wide range of musical approaches – from folklore imaginaire to speechlike or sparse, pointillist events. He is fascinated in particular by the myriad uses of the human voice in world and experimental music.

Solothurnmann loves to build bridges, and also plays with musicians from Africa and Asia. Between jazz and unidiomatic improvisation, and his current projects are influenced also by new music and ethnic styles. Moreover, he loves meeting with representatives of other art media such as poetry, slam poetry, dance, performance art, theater, painting, video and film. He is currently working with "In Transit" featuring M.J.Stevens, Potage du Jour with Franziska and Christoph Baumann, Raw & Cooked with Michel Wintsch und Christian Wolfarth, the quartet Next and Evan Parker & September Winds.

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