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Jürg Solothurnmann

JS is a saxophonist, musicologist and former editor of the Swiss national radio

About Me

M.A. Born in 1943, the saxophonist, (ethno)musicologist, writer and former radio broadcaster lives in Bern, Switzerland. As a saxophone player he evolved from jazz, blues and Latin roots to free jazz and his own concept of a multi-idiomatic music embracing jazz, new classical music and ethnic stiles and exploring synergies between spontaneity and compositional thinking. Today, his playing integrates and transforms a variety of musical approaches ranging from folklore imaginaire to speech-like or pointilist sound events. He is fascinated by the miriad of singing esthetics in world- and experimental music and favours collaborations with artists from other media. In the course of years, he collaborated with many prominent and local musicians from Europe, America and more recently the Near East and Asia – always curious about other mentalities, cultures and esthetics. His more recent/present projects include the trio Potage du Jour (with Franziska Baumann, voc, and Christoph Baumann, p), the quartet Next (with Beat Unternährer, tb, Christian Hartmann, b, and Dieter Ulrich, dr), the Swiss-Turkish quartet FreeWay, In Transit (with Michael J. Stevens, p, Daniel Studer, b, and Dieter Ulrich), the quintet September Winds (with Evan Parker), the trio Raw & Cooked (with Michel Wintsch and Christian Wolfarth), the Swiss-Chinese trio Hao Qi and changing formations with the classical pianist Katharina Weber. www.solothurnmann.com

My Jazz Story

I love jazz because it's the most dynamic and open music--a splendid marriage of emotion, intellect and spirituality--featuring personality, originality AND the spontaneous self-organisation and integration into a group. I was first exposed to jazz when I was a boy. My parents who loved social dances played shellacks of Ellington and other swing musicians. In the course of decades, I met musicians from around the world, more than I could recount. We are a big family and find "relatives" wherever we go. The best shows I ever attended were perhaps by the Art Ensemble of Chicago in the early 1970s. The first jazz record I bought was an EP with Ellingtons band around 1940. My advice to new listeners: Don't make jazz a religion or a cult of certain "stars". Everybody is best at something, Niels-Henning Pedersen once told me, and it's very stimulating to check and discover. You understand much better when you expose yourself to live music and are a part of the moment of creation. Enjoy the beauty of the moment but then let it go. Jazz is in constant flow and it's rather the live process which counts not the result. Recordings are useful--but also just a snapshot of a "frozen" past moment. At the beginning (when I had little money), I bought only one LP from each group and went on to discover others.