Peter Schärli Special Sextet featuring Glenn Ferris, Guest Barbara Berger

For decades now Peter Schärli has been leading various groups with whom he has continuously and unswervingly developed his own, very personal style of music and of making music. The most constant of these groups is the "Peter Schärli Special Sextet featuring Glenn Ferris". Their superb rhythm section with Norbert Pfammatter, Thomas Dürst and Hans Feigenwinter contributes significantly to the mastery the band displays today. Throughout its long development Glenn Ferris was an almost constant companion, and with Donat Fisch as a third voice the band has a frontline that can definitely be termed world-class.

 

This long-standing "working band" is an exquisitely coordinated formation, with a groove based not on virtuosity and energy alone, but on a collective urge to explore existing sound worlds from new angles.
Schärli's newest compositions for the sextet are inspired by works of the German turn-of-the-20th-century playwright Frank Wedekind. Entitled "Complete Lulu", the programme is Schärli's musical interpretation of Wedekind''s literary material. The result is a poetic composition in two parts, consisting of a thoroughly structured arc of composed and improvised music - a fantasy sculpture of recklessly piled-up elements that alternate in abrupt changes of mood or flow smoothly into each other. The seemingly contradictory is connected. All of this grew out of concrete text passages, or the texts generated moods that were transformed into musical ideas.

 

Peter Schärli engaged vocalist Barbara Berger specifically for this music. Her voice contributes a fascinating sensuality that matches the theme perfectly. The music is at once intoxicating and charming. It spans enormous developments and changes of mood, from almost impressionistic soundscapes to sweeping dance. The perfectly coordinated, wonderfully homogeneous sound of the ensemble produces blossoms of thrilling beauty in the solos. Sometimes the music washes around the words and voice melodies like surf lapping at crabs. The musicians show an infallible feel for the passing of time and the changing musical conditions it engenders.

 

A concluding quote from Frank Wedekind's writings gives an accurate outline of the situation: "I had wanted to let the human consciousness, which always overestimates itself beyond measure, be thwarted by the human subconscious."

We are happy to accept this kind of failure if it results in something so brilliant. 

 

Roland Strobel, July 2009

Translations: Marlène Thibault