KVT – Jazz Concert with Thärichens Tentett

Up to my neck in Tharichens Tentett.

The EU music festival threw itself upon the public at Nha Hat Lon spectacularly with the utterly spectacular German music ensemble Tharichen’s Tentett.

A piece that reared at me in spectacular fashion from the web (and I can’t source the source) says this about them that I couldn’t say any better even if I sourced all of my favorite superlatives: “Pianist and composer Nicolai Thärichen conglomerated some of Berlin’s best jazz musicians into a body of sound that he bent and kneaded until his compositions became dancing sculptures that could rear up to a thundering big band, only to slim down neatly the next moment to something akin to Giacometti’s chamber music. And he tops the whole thing with Michael Schiefel’s voice, androgynous, sensuous, wired, virtuoso, in a nutshell: totally manic. The Süddeutsche Zeitung (prominent German newspaper) praises Thärichen’s Tentett as “the most compositionally successful, most sophisticatedly arranged and most humourously presented music that Germany has to offer from a big band at the moment”. And major Frankfurter newspaper FAZ says about vocalist Michael Schiefel: “Germany has perhaps never had such a jazz singer”’

And it’s all so true!!!

Founded in 1993 the ten piece ensemble performs original compositions of songs set to the prose of poets, authors and artists such as Dorothy Parker, Lord Byron, Thomas Hardy and Ronald D. Laing and Maria Slowinska.

They were thoroughly spectacularly brilliant and any young musicians who may have shared master classes with them were spectacularly lucky.

Thanks to the Germans and Goethe for such a spektakular treat.