Concert stream available until 12 February 2023.
Cool jazz, that was the style with which musicians like Miles Davis, Chet Baker, Gerry Mulligan and John Lewis introduced a new sound around 1950 to compete with the dominant bebop. The NDR Bigband, with which Chet Baker gave his last concert in 1988, revives the legendary style together with bandleader and arranger Jörg Achim Keller – to match the »Age of Anxiety« festival, which is dedicated to 20th century American music.
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About the festival »Age of Anxiety«
The USA in the 20th century: There were chances and hopes on the one hand, fears and crises on the other. The great emigration myth of the »land of unlimited opportunity« was still valid, the belief in equal opportunity and freedom in a democratic, prosperous and modern society. But then the American Dream suddenly turned into a nightmare. After the disaster of World War Two, life in the United States was determined by the rivalry with the enemy in the East: the nuclear arms race, proxy wars, and widespread suspicion and mistrust during the McCarthy Era. On the one hand, the civil rights movement, on the other the assassination of reform president John F. Kennedy and of black-rights pioneer Martin Luther King. In 1947, the far-sighted Anglo-American writer W. H. Auden called this stress-laden era the »Age of Anxiety« in his poem of the same name. It was a troubled and restless time, but also a time of new departures, of the search for identities and ideals.
And not least in the cultural context, the 20th century was first and foremost an era when America set out to find itself. Thus Auden’s poem, on which Leonard Bernstein based his Second Symphony, has been chosen as the ambiguous title for this year’s NDR Festival. After »Stravinsky in Hamburg« last season, the NDR presents a wide panorama of American music in the 20th century.
Festival »Age of Anxiety« :Live streams
The Artists
NDR Bigband
Jörg Achim Keller arrangement and direction
American Cool Jazz :About the music
It was a group of New York musicians who met in the evenings at Gil Evans’s apartment on 45th Street to discuss new musical ideas. Miles Davis recruited a nine-man band from the discussion group and took them into a recording studio on 29 January 1949 to breathe life into the cool jazz style: peaceful and detached, self-controlled and sensitive. Even though the recordings from this studio session were not released until eight years later (on the album »Birth of The Cool«), a new tone had been set, a tone that was to develop in many different facets.
While Davis himself was soon pursuing other paths, musicians like Gerry Mulligan, Lee Konitz and John Lewis with the Modern Jazz Quartet worked on new versions of this sophisticated, swinging new style, while bandleaders such as Stan Kenton opened it up for big formats.
NDR Bigband: mirror without patina
The roots of American cool jazz go back more than 70 years – a good reason for Jörg Achim Keller and the NDR Bigband to dedicate an entire concert to this sophisticated style.
To compile the concert programme, Keller went into the archives and looked at old original arrangements. What can still be found there, the longstanding bandleader, guest conductor and arranger asked, and how can it be incorporated into today’s performances? It was important to him to present cool jazz free of nostalgia, and to establish it in the here and now, however much he loves the originals. Keller says that the NDR Bigband »includes a couple of exciting new members«.
