DÉS ANDRÁS QUARTET: UNIMPORTANT THINGS

András András Dés is one of the few percussionists who have not only absorbed a whole arsenal of musical styles as a member of various orchestras, but have also founded their own ensembles and even bands. Dés, who has been living in Vienna for five years, has now formed a quartet with three Austrian musicians, Martin Eberle, Kenji Herbert and Philipp Nykrin, to capture the essence of European jazz: diversity, openness and the power of listening to each other. The special percussion apparatus is accompanied by trumpet, piano and electric guitar, whose playing often goes far beyond stereotypes, and the musical components of the album are just as diverse. The various trends of American and European jazz of the last decades are just as much a part of the thinking of András Dés and his fellow musicians as are the old and contemporary classical music, the intuitively complex rhythmic structures of traditional music cultures or the elemental energies of various popular music influences, such as rock music.

The album Unimportant Things concludes a trilogy of music that András Dés has recorded for BMC Records in various line-ups. The common feature of the three albums, which are based on very different concepts and moods, is that they all contain a good dose of spontaneity, in that the bandleader has not inserted free improvisational passages into his compositions, but has linked them together. The eight compositions are thus transformed by the transitions into a single musical flow of roughly three quarters of an hour, in which we move from island to island, from adventure to adventure, like Odysseus returning from Troy to Ithaca.