Kurt Rosenwinkel
Kurt Rosenwinkel is one of the definitive jazz musicians of the 21st century and one of the outstanding guitar talents of his generation. The multi-instrumentalist musician-performer's multi-faceted oeuvre is centred on his 2001 album The Next Step, which he developed with his four-piece band from the mid-1990s onwards. At the end of July this year, a 1996 recording of the club concerts that made the legendary album will be released, and to celebrate the occasion, the group of outstanding musicians will once again (with almost the original line-up) reunite and tour the world. Saxophonist Mark Turner is replaced by Ben Wendel, who we have already seen at the House of Music, and drummer Jeff Ballard and bassist Ben Street, together with Rosenwinkel, can be seen for the first time in Hungary in this line-up.
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The stylistic innovator Kurt Rosenwinkel, who often plays the piano as well as the guitar and is at home on other instruments, was signed by the jazz label Verve in 1995 and has appeared in many formations as both bandleader and accompanist. He's worked with Brian Blade, Paul Motian, Joshua Redman, Aaron Goldberg, Louis Cole, among many others, but he's also been active outside jazz circles, mainly in hip-hop: he's played with Q-Tip of A Tribe Called Quest and the Roots, whose leader, drummer Questlove, he went to art school with. But his talent has also been hailed by many legends, from Eric Clapton to Donald Fagen, with whom he has performed and appeared on a major album.
His sensitively layered sound is most innovative on The Next Step, released in 2001 (Jazz Times magazine called it the best jazz album of the decade), but many of his albums have been critically acclaimed as 21st century. In 2024, one of the Next Step quartet's early concert recordings (The Next Step: Live at Smalls (1996)), recorded during the club nights at the Smalls Jazz Club in New York City, where they developed their own sound, will be released. The release of the tapes, thought to have been lost, brought the quartet back together (Mark Turner is only able to take part in one leg of the tour), and it's a must-see live, as the ensemble of instrumentalists, who are excellent in their own right, are quite astonishing when they play Rosenwinkel's compositions.
House of Music Hungary
A music education centre and concert venue in the heart of the City Park, behind the airy futuristic glass facade of Japanese architect Sou Fujimoto.
