Schnell | Rieko Okuda

The trio SCHNELL uses the bebop tradition as a starting point to investigate speed, stasis, trance, intuition, and limits. The music of some great masters of the jazz and bebop tradition (such as Parker, Monk, McLean, Powell and Ellington) is for the trio a “memory basket”, an archetype to confront their own language with.

Speed is the key element of the process, but it doesn’t function in a mechanical way. Rather, it transforms the language by pushing the players to their limits, forcing them to develop new strategies, both individually and collectively.

Bebop became repertoire music long ago, and the rational and aesthetic side of it slowly took over, leaving the improvisational process behind. For Schnell, improvisation is still the core of this music, to be played at its limits, at high speed, where body memory, intuition, and the unconscious are essentials.

cleanfeedrecords.bandcamp.com/album/live-at-sowieso

RIEKO OKUDA's solo piano work focuses on creating narrative composition through the use of overtones, non-idiomatic and unconventional sounds, and angular melodic lines with asymmetrical rhythmic figures. This results in microscopic slow movements of resonant textures overlaid by fast atonal melodic movements, sometimes using extended techniques, especially magnets to bend pitches and/or create multi-harmonics.

www.riekookuda.com