Part 2

Thanks to technological advances, collaboration has become a lot easier. What have been some of the most fruitful collaborations for you recently and what approaches to and modes of collaboration currently seem best to you?

We use a lot of technological tools to help keep our work outside of making music organized.

For us, it feels like a relief when we can meet in person just to make music - it almost feels like a holiday.

Jazz has always had an interesting relationship between honouring its roots and exploring the unknown. What does the balance between these two poles look like in your music?

I think in our group, each of us has a different relationship to the roots of jazz. I’m currently in a phase where I’m listening and studying a lot to jazz records from the 50s and 60s and am learning repertoire from this specific era, but it feels almost like a separate project - more like research.

We don’t think in terms of genres when we play or work on new music in KALI Trio. We aren’t improvising over a set of specific chord changes, so the tradition doesn’t play a role in our music-making in that sense. We also don’t work with melodies in a more traditional sense - we avoid them on purpose, which gives the music an open quality, leaving more to the imagination of the listeners. This is something I also enjoy as a music listener myself.

If I were to try and analyze it myself, I think the influence of the jazz tradition is much more present in the rhythmic aspects of our music, particularly through its vast influence on electronic music and beat culture. A good example is the track “Mos3,” with its polyrhythmic drumbeat interlocking with a very syncopated piano riff.

How much potential for something “new” is there still in jazz? What could this “new” look like?

Something that sometimes feels strange to us is that we play mostly in jazz venues, which has more to do with how our group looks on stage—grand piano, acoustic drums, and electric guitar—and less with how the music sounds.

At times, at least to us, the music has more similarities to experimental electronic music, but the tools we use, meaning the instruments, are very atypical for these kinds of stages, where modular synthesizers or laptops with Ableton are the common tools.

Having worked with artists from those music scenes—Ricardo Villalobos, Max Loderbauer, and Maarja Nuut, for example—a common ground with "jazz" is that there is also a very big improvisational aspect present.

[Read our Max Loderbauer interview]
[Read our Maarja Nuut interview]

That being said, I think, depending on how open you are with the word "jazz," the "new" can be limitless. A great example is the music of Chief Adjuah, formerly known as Christian Scott. I had the honor of being part of a workshop he led at the Montreux Jazz Festival before the pandemic. I felt really inspired by how open and inclusive he was toward different music cultures and styles, while being so strongly rooted in the jazz tradition.

Further, we’re inspired by artists like Oren Ambarchi, Kali Malone, Jules Reidy, Manuel Troller, and Julien Desprez who are also constantly searching for new sounds and breaking down genre boundaries in the process.

[Read our Oren Ambarchi interview]
[Read our creative profile on Kali Malone]

For many artists, life-changing musical experiences take place live. How do you see that yourself?

As much as we love to experiment with new music, rehearse, and spend time recording in the studio, our main motivation is to play live. There’s just something irreplaceable about connecting with different audiences and creating something that exists only in that moment and that specific room.

This became even more clear during the pandemic, when much of the music scene moved online. It’s so nice to be able to play in front of physical audiences again.

With the current political events, this kind of personal exchange is incredibly important—it helps us maintain an understanding for one another and continue functioning as a community.

How, would you say are your live performances and your recording projects connected at the moment? How do they mutually influence and feed off each other?  

We definitely lean on the tracks and structures from the album when we’re performing live.

Playing live gives us much more time to develop the material and explore new corners that we didn’t touch on during the recording, which is very enjoyable for us.   

Ímprovisation is obviously an essential element of jazz, but I would assume that just like composition, it is transforming. How do you feel has the role of improvisation changed in jazz?

For us, improvisation is very much about finding an arc over a piece, about listening, and creating textures.

On the track “Cascading,” pianist Raphael and I are weaving our sounds into guitarist Urs’ rhythmic and syncopated improvisation. As the track progresses, the focus slowly shifts to the piano emerging from the guitar cloud.

The improvisatory part is as much about the sounds as it is about finding moments together when the music shifts into a new direction.

What, would you say, are the key ideas behind your approach to improvisation?

We’re very much interested in finding a collective approach to improvisation and blurring the lines between composition and improvisation.

We always seek sounds that blend together and create something new, which couldn’t be achieved by a single player. Rather than thinking in more traditional roles where a soloist is accompanied by others, in our collective, the focus can shift at any moment, so it becomes difficult to tell which instrument is playing which part.

The second single off the album, “4K Gently Peaceful,” is a good example of how the piano, guitar, and subtle electronics from the drums blend.



Are there approaches, artists, festivals, labels, spaces or anyone/-thing else out there who you feel deserve a shout out for taking jazz into the future?

We’re lucky to be part of an amazing scene in Switzerland, where many genres blend and bands take a more collective approach to improvisation. I’m thinking of artists like Andrina Bollinger, Miao Zhao, and Martina Berther with her solo album Bassworks: As I Venture Into, as well as bands like Sc’öof, Divr, or Nik Bärtsch’s Mobile - of which I’m a part myself.

[Read our Martina Berther interview]

As for jazz festivals, I think my favorite one that I visited (and is now discontinued) was called A L’ARME!. It was one of the few festivals where I had the feeling that anything could happen. The invited artists were incredibly forward-thinking, yet from extremely diverse corners of the music world.

The Montreux Festival intends to preserve its archive of recordings for future generations. Do you personally feels it's important that everything should remain available forever - or is there something to be said for letting beautiful moments pass and linger in the memories of those that experienced them?

Personally, I think it’s great that some of those moments get preserved. At the same time, I also think it’s important to realize that it will never replace the experience of being there yourself.

I had an interesting experience with a concert I saw from the London Jazz Composers Orchestra. The concert was completely transformative for me - almost an out-of-body experience. I couldn’t talk to anyone after the concert; I just wanted that impression to last as long as possible.

A year later, a DVD of the very same concert was released. I started watching it but had to turn it off after a minute because I realized it would destroy the memories of the concert I had.