gurdjieff trio ^{[ deutsch ]}

George I. Gurdjieff was a "seeker of truth". Born in 1866 in the Armenian city of Alexandropol, he tried to gain lost knowledge about spiritual contexts during his travels in the late 19th century through the Caucasus, Central Asia, the Orient and North Africa.

In 2008, I was invited to the International Art Biennial in Gyumri, Armenia, to work with Armenian artists and musicians. Gyumri is the former Alexandropol. So I started to look again at Gurdjieff, read some of his writings and studied the music he dictated to Thomas de Hartmann in the 1920s.

What fascinated me most about Gurdjieff's music was that he didn't have traditional melodies notated, but rather, in a first step of abstraction, he put the music of the many regions he had travelled through into form as he remembered them. The second abstraction is the notation for piano. The music comes from cultures that use microtonal scales, but he dictates for THE bourgeois, European instrument on which, at the same time, avant-garde composers such as Schönberg or Stravinsky are testing their new compositional methods.

In recent years, attempts have been made to take a step back and adapt Gurdjieff's music for the instruments of the countries of origin, i.e. to take away the abstractions from his music and give it a more traditional folk music sound. In contrast, my approach of thinking his music further led to arrangements for the instrumentation of trumpet, drums and Fender Rhodes. This places it sonically in a jazz context. (Gurdjieff died in France in 1949. At the same time, Harold Rhodes was working on the development of an electromechanical piano).

The result is a suite of Gurdjieff-music, some of which is orchestrated for this instrumentation, but some of which uses the melodies as in jazz: as chorus over which to improvise. Sprinkled in between are some pieces inspired by Gurdjieff and whose melodies could have come from him.

These melodies are played by the long-time trumpet soloist of the WDR Bigband Klaus Osterloh and Michael Pape, who works with me in the ENSEMBLE DE PLAINTE and many other projects, sits on the drums.

A selection of the 2015 recordings has been remastered for the vinyl edition.