Bone Crusher Tour 2019 @ Brötz 190911 nr 780 (Full Show)
In 2017, the Polish label Not Two Records released the CD Konzert für Hannes, a live recording made in 2016 by the trio of trombonists Matthias Müller, Matthias Muche, and myself, Jeb Bishop. The unique circumstances of that concert meant that the concert and recording were dedicated to our recently deceased colleague, the great German trombonist Johannes Bauer; more info is available in the liner notes linked above.
Due mostly to efforts by the two Matthiases, this trio was able to do a run of eleven concerts in Europe in August/September 2019 titled Bone Crusher Tour 2019. We performed at festivals in Antwerp, Belgium; Mulhouse, France; the area around Groningen, Netherlands; and also played concerts in Amsterdam, Ljubljana, Trondheim (Norway), Cologne, Berlin, Gothenburg (Sweden), Halmstad (Sweden), and Bochum (Germany). We have live recordings from Antwerp and Berlin that will probably be used for an upcoming release.
Matthias Muche recorded videos of all the concerts and made the short edits presented below. There is also a video of our concert in Gothenburg recorded by the venue, Brötz, included above. Additional videos can be found on Matthias Muche’s Vimeo page.
Bone Crusher Tour 2019: Meteo – Mulhouse Music Festival (Excerpts)
This show, at the Météo Festival in Mulhouse, France, was unusual in that we performed in a very large, almost completely dark ‘black box’ room, the center of which was occupied by a large rectangular configuration of the instruments and equipment of the group who played after us. There was no stage in a conventional sense and no seating for the audience.
At the sound check, we decided to put three microphones in three corners of the room and to have white spotlights on each of those mics; we also ended up making a stage-like space with our mutes along one wall. We started the set with each of us at one of the mics, with our sounds amplified through the room by speakers along the four walls, but fairly quickly left the mics and spent time walking around in the space, among the audience, with some convening, moving back apart, and reconvening at the stage-like area. The video necessarily fails to capture a lot of that, but you get the idea, sort of.
Bone Crusher Tour 2019: BRÖTZ Gothenburg (Excerpts)
The name Brötz is of course a tip of the hat to the pioneering German improviser Peter Brötzmann. The story I heard is that the organizers there postulate a unit of energy in improvised music, the ‘Brötz,’ and then rate the concerts as to how many Brötz were attained. My rough estimate is that we hit 0.8 Brötz on this evening. I don’t know if anyone has made it to a full Brötz yet.
Bone Crusher Tour 2019: Zomerjazzfietstour Groningen 2019 (Excerpts)
This yearly festival (the ‘Summer Jazz Bicycle Tour’) is based in towns and villages around the Dutch city of Groningen. The towns are all close together and connected by bikeable roads. Audience members spend the day biking from one village to the next, depending on what they want to see/hear.
Our venue was a very small, old church in the village of Den Ham. We’d gotten up absurdly early in Mulhouse that morning, flew to Amsterdam, took a train to Groningen, and got picked up at the train station there and driven to our tiny church. Then we had a few hours to kill, so we warmed up in the graveyard, ate sandwiches and drank coffee provided by the pastor, and I had a short nap on a flat gravestone. For our first set, the one you see here, the pews were packed.
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Jeb Bishop
Matthias Müller
Matthias Muche