September & October News

From September 18th until October 5th triosence was on tour in Taiwan and we had a really exciting time. Our manager Lisa Chang got us involved in this project and the idea was to re-arrange taiwanese traditional music and transform it into „triosence-style“ jazz. Bernhard did most of the arrangements, but also Vitaliy Zolotov and me re-did one song. For me, it was the first time to actually arrange a tune by somebody else and it was very exciting and I learned a lot doing it.

We rehearsed and performed the music with taiwanese singers Huang-Chi Hsiao and Emiliy Guan under the supervision of taiwanese superstar David Lee who functioned as the M.D. for the project.

After 4 days of rehearsals (and tons of rehearsals before starting the trip :-) ) we played a showcase in the red-house of Taipei and had two press-conferences prior to the event.

The actual concerts took place in major concert halls each in front of more than 1500 people with radio and TV broadcasting. The crew in Taiwan did an amazing job in preparing great stage-settings, making music videos to each performed song and I am really happy that now I can say: I played a concert with a „bubbles-machine“ (always wanted to do that :-) ).

The shows were a great success and we are allready invited to Taiwan again and I am looking forward to what is coming up next. The Taiwanese people I met are very friendly and incredible hosts. They made us feel very special and I can hardly express my sincere appreciation for their hard work!

Right before the tour triosence played a very nice sold-out concert at jazzclub Wernigerode. Here is what the press said to the concert.
On October 21nd we played our last concert for this year in Berlin at the „Jazz in den Ministergärten“ – Festival. Great bands performed there and I am happy that I met my dear colleagues Christoph Hillmann and Rodrigo Villalon. Rodrigo was at our show, too and filmed a short clip of the song 728 and my little drumsolo. You can find it on my facebook-page here.

With Edgar Knecht and his quartett we were part of the „Stimmenfang“ Festival in Nürnberg and the „Enjoy Jazz Festival“ in Heidelberg. Both shows were great fun and I was amazed by the audiences reactions to our shows. Thanks for buying the CDs and for the great talks after the concert. In Nürnberg local hero Yogo Pausch invited me to join his „drummers bigband“ and I had a lot of fun performing their arrangements spontaneously that night. Here are a couple of impressions of Edgar’s concerts…

I was also playing two clinics in October. One by myself in Ostgroßefehn at Musikhaus Ahrends and one with Ritmo Del Mundo (Nene Vasquez & me) at shop2rock in Neustrelitz. Both were nice events and I am happy that I received so many good reactions afterwards. Thanks again to Sonor drums for putting up these events.

The picture below shows you the cover of Christina Lux’s new CD „Playground“. The songs are a collaboration with Reentko Dirks, fabulous guitar player from Dresden and it features some great musicians like Marius Goldhammer (bass), Dominik Krämer (bass) and many more. I am very happy that I could contribute drumtracks to a couple of songs, too. You can buy it here at Christina’s shop.

Next things coming up are rehearsals with some good friends and preparing studio-sessions with triosence, Edgar Knecht, Omid Bahadori, Jazzkantine’s guitarist Tom Bennecke and others.

I will keep you posted.

Bye, Stephan