Concertgebouw Brugge 2014

This year legendary trio Georg Graewe / Ernst Reijseger / Gerry Hemingway have this year a great jubilee! 30 year on the improvised music scene! Three great artist, three marvelous improvisers, three excellent musicians who enriche a great history of music with three compositions recorded live in Concertgebouw in Brugge.

Liner Note:
1989 saw us doing our first tours and recordings and in those early days we played quite frequently. But for some 20 years now we’ve been getting together only sporadically for festivals and special concerts here and there. To me our performances often have the qualities of an argument, which seems one of the reasons they’ve mostly worked out fine – out of pure self-defense on everybody’s part, I assume. Real polyphony is about conflict and there’s plenty of it in the mix here. As a trio I picture us on this very special terrain that’s completely ours – a secret place (as we don’t tell anybody its coordinates) that we only visit when we play together. There are multiple layers of musical time there, but no such thing as mechanical or biological time. That’s somewhere out there and who cares ….
Georg Graewe,

We start and there is the genuine sensation of the unknown. It often feels as if the place we inhabit while playing is guiding us, rather then our configuring it’s coordinates. I once challenged a very knowledgable music writer to articulate what’s going on for him as a listener when we perform, and his answer was “I don’t know, I can’t explain it.” On the one hand I was surprised by his answer, wondering how what clearly makes sense when it happens can elude definition in reflection, at least in words. On the other hand it confirmed what the experience has been from the stage, that we are fortunate not to know either, only to be.
Gerry Hemingway

When people see me walking with my cello, they often ask me ‚What kind of music do you play?’ My answer: I can never be sure, because the only thing we are sure of, is that we enter the stage at a set time. After that, nothing is certain.
All ingredients for good music have always been present in this trio: there’s skill and there is urge. We thrive of ‚not knowing’, because it clears the space, makes room to invent, to confront, to allow synchronicity. Not knowing is the prerequisite of this music. This music unfolds from parts of our brain that we cannot put into words, only into movement. And the music keeps coming. For 30 years now. May it last.

Ernst Reijseger