Monday 04 January 2016

Andreas Polyzogopoulos, Quartet 4ET "Anicca"

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Anicca is the third personal album by the trumpeter and composer Andreas Polyzogopoulos. With a renewed group, Andreas introduces us to his new compositions that have matured over time, and as they have been played for some time now in concerts and presentations in various musical stages in Greece and Europe.
 
On Monday, January 4, 2016, we are to be taken on a trip by Kostis Christodoulou (keyboards), Antonis Maratos (bass), Alexandros Ktistakis (drums) and Andreas Polyzogopoulos (trumpet, effects) at Linto Organisation.
 
The focus of the compositions and the source of the artist's inspiration is Anicca. This is the sense of temporality, as he himself experienced it at a Vipassana meditation course in the spring of 2014. As he had to stay in silence for ten days, he acquired a different "sense of self" since at that time he discovered unexplored internal aspects. "This is what I think is the spirit of the album- Change through deep exploration" he says.
 
 
 
“Andreas Polyzogopoulos is one of the very rare occasions of musicians that from their beginning they seem to have an almost inexplicably developed maturity. It is not so his exceptional music studies as his aesthetic choices and his eclecticism in his music orientation that led him there. It is his strong concerns and his continued seek in every interesting and advanced front of contemporary musical creation. And of course it is the quality of his goals, that is the quest for meaning and not merely for a superficial sensationalism” says composer Vangelis Katsoulis of Utopia that accompanied Polyzogopoulos from the very start throughout the procedure of recording.
 
He goes on to say: "Andreas has participated in two of my own albums and we have had the chance for several more collaborations, while we have been connected by a very warm friendship. So it came natural to him to refer the matter to Utopia for the release of his new album. Equally natural and self-evident have been all my collaborations with him. The fact that he studied close to Markus Stockhausen and Paolo Fresu, the two beloved trumpet players with whom I have worked with for years and who he admires and considers role models, provides the answer to why Andreas, was from the first moment so very familiar ".
 
 
Of course, Anicca has equally been based on Andreas’s rich experience gained by continuous playing, interaction and the common history that musicians write through seeking for "the absolute sound". In 2006, Andreas founded his quartet while studying at the Conservatory of Amsterdam.
 
Two years later, his first CD entitled Perfumed Dreams is recorded and is based on his own compositions. This album apart from great reviews was also awarded with the first prize in the jazz contest Motives in Belgium. There followed an extensive presentation of live music performances in Greece, Belgium and the Netherlands. In this tour, Andreas starts experimenting with electronic sound which combined with the inspiration that he takes from Miles Davis, Chet Baker, Paolo Fresu and Nils Petter Molvaer, make him discover his own voice.
 
In 2012 he released the album "Heart of the Sun", a tribute to Pink Floyd music, Andreas’ favorite rock band. In this album he tried to stay close to the original material than to change the melodies making new harmonization. The CD received excellent reviews by Greek and foreign magazines and the quartet toured in New York, Amsterdam, Paris, Munich, Dresden, Berlin and many Greek cities.
 
The new elements that Anicca brings along are Antonis Maratos’s timbre of the electric bass (an old familiar from Mode Plagal), the recognizable playing of Greek-Swedish guitarist Andreas Chourdaki (known for its collaboration with the E.S.T. drummer, Magnus Ostrom) but also Anreas’s two stable partners, Kostis Christodoulou on keyboards and Alexandros-Drakos Ktistakis on drums and percussion.
 
In eight groundbreaking album compositions an intense Mediterranean flavor emerges, mixed with some rock harmonic creativity, reminding us of the trumpeter’s reference to the Pink Floyd, while of course a delightful new jazz dominates that articulates its idiosyncratic discourse whether to express its melancholy (Barbas, Not Even, I am missed), or its quiet flow of a deep-internal thinking (Anicca), or its concern and joy (Volcano in the Sea, Pont Luis Blanc, Vigla, Apagio).
 
Linto Organisation/ Level B
Monday, January 4, 2016
Time: 21:00
Reservations/ Info: 2410532693 & info@linto.gr

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