Uwe Dierksen - Blue Rock Thrush

Pop? Rock? Jazz? Uwe Dierksen does not know this himself for certain. In addition, he does not want to know or perhaps even define this on principle. His new CD "Blue Rock Thrush" aims to draw the listener's attention less to any style and categorizations, but instead only refers to the blue rock thrush common in East Asia, whose English translation inspired him to give the CD this title.

In other words, a bird species. The song "Birdcrunch" also fits to that. The piece is based on a cassette tape, on which a cross section of birds in Thailand can be heard. Dierksen, trombonist in Ensemble Modern as well as the band Mavis and one of the most experienced interpreters of contemporary music in Germany is following the trail of ornithologists, Franciscan priests and composer Olivier Messiaen, who composed a piece for piano and small orchestra entitled "Oiseaux exotiques” (trans.: Exotic Birds) in 1956. Whoever assumes that this is perhaps a documentary about exotic bird songs is on the wrong track. Messiaen honored above all the musicality of the flying singers with his composition. It is a kind of musical transfer thinking, which Uwe Dierksen also likes to practice. Although the music apparently sounds like hard rock in his "Vogelkrise”, the idea is by no means exhausted with that. Quotes of the English composer Harrison Birtwistle can be heard in the middle of songs.

"Audio books without words: yes, that would perhaps fit best." Dierksen has often been asked to characterize his music, and his opposite has just as often reaped a friendly-helpless shrug. "I don’t want to be pigeonholed in any case," the 56-year-old Hanoverian said, who has extensive conceptual and practical experience with music of the 20th and 21st centuries both as an ensemble musician and as a soloist. As Dierksen knows, the reason is that pigeonholes restrict your way of looking at (listening to) things.

However, it’s not possible totally without such, although an attempt to describe his soundscapes works more on the exclusion principle. At any rate, it certainly isn't jazz. Although his improvisatory approach is interesting, it is rather as far as one can go in coming up with a collective term for a range of musical clichés. In a radio feature, Hans-Jürgen Linke called Dierksen’s music "a very headstrong and elaborate synthesis between contemporary pop and new music". Especially on "Blue Rock Thrush", which was already recorded in 2009 but has now been newly edited, there are lots of citations and references, staged with strong emotional intensity, with rhythmic incisiveness and metric sophistication. The meters change frequently, and sometimes it seems as if the trombonist and his colleagues Matthias Stich (soprano, alto/tenor saxophone and bass clarinet), Markus Höller (keyboards and accordion), Christopher Brandt (bass and guitar) and Jan Koslowski (guitar) would also change on the fly. Michael Feil (drums) and American opera singer Claron McFadden, who lives in the Netherlands, overlap several layers.

Uwe Dierksen loves modern musical architecture. Starting from the simple construction of a composition, which sometimes has the catchiness of pop songs, he carefully approaches an increasingly complex structure that entices you to "adventurous listening”. For example, this is the case in the deceptive 'Amsterdam', in which the bass drum does not follow the bass, but instead secretly builds a completely independent melody line. Or in "Pansyleaves", a more traditionally structured song, in which – noun est omen – the pansies shed their leaves and allow the performers unimagined freedom.

Freedom and spontaneity: terms such as these stimulate every ambitious musician, especially those who move in a particular, ordered system their whole lives. With Uwe Dierksen, however, this has taken on seemingly infinite dimensions in the meantime. It is an attempt to explain his immense and uncompromising desire for freedom.