CD REBOOT
What matters is how they create a meta-harmonic, pan-rhythmic togetherness, connecting seemingly unconnected pulses into a musical whole. Thus, the pieces border closely with New Music, refuse complaisance and are able to act fluid and challenging at the same time. Despite its tendency toward creative abstraction, Reboot has the power to sound very concrete.
Ralf Dombrowski, jazzthing
Friedrich continues along the path that a Paul Bley or a Bob Degen explored with the later ECM boss Manfred Eicher on bass. The demand for agogics, also in jazz, becomes blissful reality here: fascinating, sensuous sonorities of the piano tangle and disentangle themselves with the highest tonal sensitivity of the drums and songful warm-sounding bass lines.
Thomas Fitterling, Rondo
In all balancing acts between the tonal and atonal, Reboot is still ultimately a "jazz album," and it's a very strong one, mind you! Unerringly, it accesses art music of the 20th century successfully, namely an invention of Witold Lutoslawski and Arnold Schoenberg's Piano Pieces, Op 11/1.
Stefan Pieper, nrwjazz.net
From the first note on, they act with perfect empathy and communicate with instinct, sensitivity and full of passion in a unique way. Never before have the limits of traditional jazz been more excitingly blurred than on Reboot.
Franz X.A. Zipperer, Jazzthetik
The trio breathes life into the music and sometimes seems to stand in wonder at what emerges. Piano trio jazz can be so exciting.
Thorsten Meyer, Jazzpodium
CD MONOSUITE
"Monosuite" - that's what this fascinating work with its sparkling, shimmering sounds is called - contains music that bursts out in a powerful, clear tonal stream. The listener is immediately pulled into a maelstrom of undiscovered beauty. This is a stunning composition for a 22-piece string orchestra and four masterful jazz soloists. These great musicians interact with the Sequenza String Orchestra in lively, elastic, and amazingly organic piece of jazz artistry - inspired music played with creative discipline.
Rating: ***** (musical performance & sonic quality)
Arnaldo DeSouteiro / Jazz Station
Pianist Jurgen Friedrich doesn't play a single note of music on Monosuite, but his personality and cognitive bearing are omnipresent. While Friedrich's piano was at the heart of the sound on the trio-based Pollock, he removes his hands from the ivories on this follow-up date, allowing a cadre of string players and a highly flexible foursome to express his well-crafted thoughts in their own way.
This 49-minute opus is as much about sought-after equilibrium as anything else. Friedrich builds a series of checks and balances between the strings and improvisers, never letting one dominate for too long, but always allowing for strange meetings and sensational story lines. The strings have their say as they spring to life and sprint up and down on the album opener "Waves," but the improvisers make their move soon after. Alto saxophonist Hayden Chisholm explores the surroundings of "Breaks" with some support from the strings, while drummer John Hollenbeck helps to feed the string-born intrigue on the fabulous "Fiddlesticks." "Blossom" quickly builds to sonic overload before breaking into free roaming dissonant explorations and "Low Tide" proves to be an eerie aural fright of a track. Pianist Achim Kaufmann's foreboding fingers bring a sense of angular dread to this piece.
While Friedrich sets this suite in motion with a series of miniatures, the last four movements are lengthy constructs. "Loops" deals with focus shifts and a tug of war between the uncertain and direct. "Ritual" opens on a solo bass meditation from John Hébert, and builds into a folk-like melody with staccato strings emulating guitar or banjo sounds. "Chacaglia" begins with exotic percussion sprints before settling into somber territory, while the album-ending "Weave" comes off like the illegitimate musical child of film composer Thomas Newman, the legendary Igor Stravinsky, minimalist icon John Adams, and arranger Eddie Sauter, who makes the list because of his urgent, Stan Getz-associated "I'm Late, I'm Late."
Friedrich creates freedom within order throughout this ambitious suite and he never simply uses the strings as window dressing. This is music that thrives on integration and the promise of what might be waiting around the next corner. Relationships, be they simple or complex in nature, are at the heart of this work, helping to make Monosuite a fascinating listen from beginning to end.
Dan Bilawsky / allaboutjazz
Quite a change of pace for a label known mostly for solo piano and small groups, this set let's a progressive composer/improviser really let fly as he takes a string orchestra to task for a wonderful and wily impressionistic ride that ventures into contemporary classical music realms and journeys with it's head held high. Tailor made for the adult listener looking for something engaging he can't quite put his finger on but will return to often, this is quite the grand work for the musically adventurous. Well done.
Midwest Record
Mr. Friedrich`s writing for strings is most impressive. Sweeping waves, with the elegance of Mother Nature`s wind or water currents gliding together underneath. The entire disc flows like a truly superb suite from beginning to end!
Bruce Lee Gallanter / Downtown Music Gallery
Jürgen Friedrich redefines the marriage of jazz and classical music, his concept is nothing however it’s sheer brilliance to align perfectly the angular symmetry, harmonics and frame the intricacies of these idioms into a chamber of improvisation is simply a masterpiece to behold.
Rob Young | Urban Flux Media
Highly recommended. Pianist Jurgen Friedrich takes on the roles of composer and conductor, and leads a talented quartet of Hayden Chisholm on alto sax, John Hollenbeck on drums, John Hebert on bass, and Achim Kaufmann in the piano seat, along with an army of strings for a chamber jazz album that sometimes isn’t much jazz at all and at other times nails that beauteous third-stream synergy of Ornette Coleman’s collaboration with the London Philharmonic Orchestra. An album that alternates between expansive sounds and those that wouldn’t disturb a flickering candlelight. Challenging music that doesn’t sacrifice any beauty in the process.
Dave Sumner / emusic
Monosuite is an intriguing work between contemporary classical music and jazz. An experiment in which timbres, sophistication, discipline, improvisation and surprise compete with each other. The result is a multi-layered and adventurous music that is worth listening to many times.
Rinus van der Heijden / Jazzenzo
Jürgen Friedrich wins first place in two categories: Composer and Arranger. Best of Jazz 2012, 34th Annual Jazz Station Poll conducted by jazz journalist, jazz historian & jazz educator Arnaldo DeSouteiro. Chick Corea, Stanley Clarke, Ron Carter, Toots Thielemans, Mike Longo, John McLaughlin, Al Jarreau, Jürgen Friedrich, Randy Brecker and Till Brönner are among the top artists of the year.
This CD cuts through with momentum, pureness and freedom.
Ángel Gómez Aparicio / Cuardernos de Jazz
A superb suite from beginning to end.
Vincent Cotro / Jazzman
Recommended.
David. R. Adler / The New York City Jazz Record
CD POLLOCK
This trio is one of the most dangerously empathetic ensembles working today. One part Bill Evans mixed with one part Myra Melford plus three parts individualism. In the world of introspective, feeling, and sensitive pianists you cannot find many stronger jazz pianists than Jurgen Friedrich. He has crafted a unique style that, no matter the context and no matter who he works with, the surrounding musicians always change their playing to match this young immensely talented musician. Hebert’s playing is absolutely spectacular throughout. He is not responsible for outlining harmonic structures but is free to play inside of those structures, elucidating a chord here or a return to tonic there just by his mere use of hints or allusions. Moreno’s drumset work is, at most times, more about color and how he reflects on the proceedings instead of anything as banal as time keeping. A truly great recording.
Thomas R. Erdmann / Jazzpreview.com
Three passionate tonal painters who act with the most valuable of all colors: heart and soul.
Reinhard Köchl / Jazzthing
Organic structures and driving pulse. Jürgen Friedrich convinces with a soundwise and compositionally excellent album. In the jazz piano trio scene, itself amply occupied by prominent talent, this trio deserves recognition that it has found its own language. It is great how it has constantly developed this originality with a new thrust of ideas and intensity. Jürgen Friedrich has delivered us an early masterpiece with his youngest album Pollock: playful energy, tonal-harmonic complexity and the interpreters’ and composers’ experience and ability to control combine in the recording, which is also excellently recorded. The trio opens Monk’s classic “’Round Midnight” into an impressionist space and serial extrapolations, then seizes rondo and rhapsodic structures and integrates alternative contemporary pop impulses into the melodics. The well-rehearsed trio fosters a delicate harmonic architecture as well as drive and dynamics.
Rainer Beßling
Critic`s choice. Today, piano trios are being produced in excess. If one of them wants to stand out from the crowd, it has to be very good. This one is just that. In association with John Hébert, bass, Tony Moreno, drums, Friedrich weaves fine, complex tonal structures which one can associate as much with the free expressivity of a Jackson Pollock as with the romanticism of a Bill Evans.
Bert Noglik / MDR Jazzzeitung
Jazz CD of the month. As one can hear on its earlier albums, this trio does not idle – and this is extremely seldom in the history of jazz. Jürgen Friedrich and his American partners, John Hébert and Tony Moreno, establish themselves as one of the most interesting trios of current jazz with this coup.
Werner Stiefele / Audio
The magic of interaction. The trio made up of the pianist from Cologne, Germany, Jürgen Friedrich and the New Yorker dream team, consisting of the bassist John Hébert and drummer Tony Moreno, has been active for ten years and lives out the transatlantic entente cordially and musically. The title of their fifth CD, Pollock, refers to the US action painter, Jackson Pollock (1912 – 1956), who was influential beyond the realm of painting. And in the central three recorded tracks, of eleven, the trio takes Pollock’s dynamic way of working as a productive approach. In tonal collective improvisation, the trio juggles and balances from the moment itself with much empathy, which attunes into tonal colors, melodies, texture, etc.: amazing parallels to their visual paragon! Accessible trio music in spite of its fine complexity, full of contrasts, widely diverse, independent and played at the highest level. Five stars.
Jürg Sommer / Aargauer / Mittelland / Solothurner Zeitung
With lightness. The German pianist Jürgen Friedrich and the Americans John Hébert (bass) and Tony Moreno (drums) are able to spark “’Round Midnight,” a pearl nearly played to death, with new facets: indeed, this represents the high point of the CD. It is impressive with which playful lightness Friedrich, who as the first European received the Gil Evans Award for Jazz Composition, creates a liberated lightness. There is no tone too much, nothing seems demonstrative with all compositional sophistication. The CD exudes a relaxed, yet enthralling atmosphere. Although one is not lulled at any position by familiar cliches heard a thousand times, but rather is confronted with new ideas, one feels enshrouded by the music in a bewitching manner. The three celebrate chamber-like jazz eye to eye with the great trios of Bill Evans and Keith Jarrett. Sound and music: five stars.
Reiner Nitschke / Fono Forum
A fascinating piano trio CD thanks to the special coherence of the protagonists, a coherent masterpiece of interplay that has grown over many years! The trio masters the art of the tonal painting in the most wonderful colors that can shimmer and illuminate, applied here tenderly, there powerfully. Soulful music from fascinating shades of color.
Tobias Böcker / Jazzzeitung
There’s an alluring sense of discovery about the trio of Jurgen Friedrich (piano), John Hébert (bass) and Tony Moreno (drums). The group, a serendipitous accident, continues its exciting chemistry on this second Pirouet album. The dark-hued Samarkand, a wonderfully fluid Ripple, the interaction out of the brief theme for Billy No Mates or Friedrich’s lovely Over, the musical storytelling of Flauschangriff – all shun superfluous gesture. It’s a restraint that applies also to three improv interludes and, especially, to the only non-original, Round Midnight, which pulls off the difficult feat of combining respect with individuality. Five stars.
Ray Comiskey / Irish Times
The trio has a way of playing that gets to the heart or crux of the matter.
Doug Simpson / Audaud.com
Jürgen Friedrich composes diametrically, on various levels. The contrasts are what attracts. An excellent pianist who knows how to oppose the flow of the elements.
Tom Fuchs / Piano News
One does not need to read the current and numerous positive reviews. One simply feels that three musical personalities have found each other in the music; a pianist, however, should be celebrated here above all.
Ulfert Goeman / Jazzpodium
Pianist Jürgen Friedrich has that certain indescribable: he has his own sound.
Katharina Lohmann / Amazon Editorial Department
One will not only hear more from this pianist. One wants to hear more. Absolutely.
Rheinischer Merkur
CD SEISMO
What the pianist Juergen Friedrich accomplishes on the Trio-CD Seismo is fabulous. Merely by reducing the volume, he feigns a friendliness, behind which a vortex of passion lurks.
Jazzthing
The dream team. Juergen Friedrich, one of the most accomplished pianists in the scene, and Hebert-Moreno, the rhythm group par excellence, reach a level of interaction that easily compares with the best recordings by Bill Evans and Paul Bley.
Juerg Sommer / Aargauer Zeitung / CH
In the history of jazz, there are but few trios whose members communicate so intensively as the pianist Juergen Friedrich, the bassist John Hebert and the drummer Tony Moreno. Bill Evans, Keith Jarrett, Joachim Kuehn, and Myra Melford hint at the level on which the Cologne musician and his American partners move again and again – it goes without saying that they have their very own approach. Their music is so wide-ranging and open, so harmonious and friendly, so sparing and rich, that it is unmistakable. Nothing is superfluous. Every tone, every chord, every beat with the brush or stick, every hesitation, every pause, every flow has its purpose. The communicative atmosphere, the permanent change of colour, the waiting and letting rip, the synthesis and contradictions, the constant interchange and the infinitely deep harmony live within the listener long after the CD has ended. A magnificent record!
Werner Stiefele
To sink into these fascinating modern, expressive tonal worlds gives one incredible joy. Truly great art. A godsend to the German scene.
Jazzcorner
A trio recording of top international format. Whether lyrical and melodious, or free and expressive, the tonal language of the trio is consistently of a piece. That all three are masters of their instruments, goes without saying. From this, the actual or perhaps fourth virtual instrument emerges: the trio. A remarkably true recording.
Jazzpodium
CD RESISTANCE
Resistance is one of the most brilliant piano trio records in a long time. Exquisite conversations about cleverly composed themes, no empty demonstrations of technique but rather music with a purpose, free and tonal at the same time, conservative and simultaneously reaching for the unknown. It couldn’t be better. For interpretation and sound: five stars (out of five).
Stephan Richter / Fonoforum
On their new record ‚Resistance’, pianist Juergen Friedrich, bassist John Hebert and percussionist Tony Moreno make music as sensitively and interactively as only the world’s best can. Whether it’s a ballad or the rapidly pulsating "Sonnet”: at all times, three equal musicians communicate with each other. Even in their three solo pieces, each musician plays so creatively that it seems as if his instrument is talking to itself.
Musically abstract and ingeniously composed, but at the same time sensual, earthy and elegant.
Martin Laurentius / jazzthing
Piece for piece, Friedrich, Hebert and Moreno invent the piano trio anew on their CD Resistance. It is surprising how brilliantly they immerse themselves in each different composition and question ostensible constants of trio music such as expression or instrumentation and develop them from scratch. In doing so, the pieces follow an inner logic which forms the variety into unity. Democracy lives in this group, not only in their unpretentious name but in their music.
Stefan Arndt / Jazzthetik
CD SURFACING
Pianist Jurgen Friedrich has a firm grasp on the Paul Bley-via-Bill Evans brand of lyrical improvisation, along with an elegant touch and plenty of poise. 3 1/2 stars out of 4.
Art Lange / Tower Records Pulse magazine
The trio Friedrich-Herbert-Moreno has a structured, free-wheeling sound pregnant with personality and panache. This is progressive trio music that should be considered with that of pianists Paul Bley and Uri Caine. Introspectively extroverted. A paradox speaking to an enigma about an iconoclast. This music is a superb, poorly behaved collection that will tickle the fancy of any advant-gardist without running off the more mainstream.
Michael Bailey / allaboutjazz.com
A true group performance. Surfacing is the debut recording of the trio - it seems almost impossible that they have achieved such empathy and finesse without years of exposure.
Dick Stafford / musicweb
CD VOYAGE OUT
Deceptively simple, there is a polite though adventurousness air to this attractive performance by a trio that sounds perfectly synchronized. While Jurgen Friedrich`s piano appears at first blush to be the lead voice, a close reviev reveals a group sound in which each member contributes his share. The music swings lightly but this is not by any means easy listening. There is an elegant sophistication to both the compositions and the improvisations, which while never showy nonetheless disclose a technical superiority. The pianist is not afraid to lay back and gently dart simple clusters or evan single notes over an active rhythmic bottom, not unlike birds gliding over a somewhat tempestuous river. At other times, there is a smooth calmness to the whole that never seams to meander, but provides a soothing pleasure not unlike that of the late Bill Evans. Friedrich's playing may derive from the Evans school, but he is more economical, which, at least to this listener, is a plus. Tony Moreno is one of the most underrated drummers on the scene, capable of many styles, listening and reacting with almost immediate precision. He boasts a rare delicacy, but can also drive hard and powerfully when necessary. John Hebert's bass melds quietly and unobtrusively, his pastel-like lines barely noticeable, but nearly always critical. The trio`s ability to change tempo and dynamics at a moment's notice is either the result of remarkable clairvoyance or (more likely) solid preparation. The results are both entertaining and enlightening, and this compellingly understated recording charms in a subtle manner that is almost breathless in its beauty.
Stephen Loewy / Cadence Magazin
JÜRGEN FRIEDRICH QUARTET + KENNY WHEELER
Summerflood is the discovery of this summer! The Juergen Friedrich-Quartet creates an enormous depth with minimalistic structures and chamber music-like nuances. Kenny Wheeler never acts as a guest star but plays with like-minded companions moving, hopeful, magnificent music.
Jazzthing
Juergen Friedrich is the great, young composition talent. He is the first non-american who won the Gil Evans Award. 'The Right Mistake' and 'My Shy I' are tomorrow`s jazz standards.
Matthias Creutziger
If his compatriot Johannes Brahms would arise from the dead and become a jazz musician he would doubtlessly appreciate the astonishing architectural logic of Friedrich`s composition "The right mistake". Best new jazz artist, huge creative potential, access to innovation and a higly personal concept. A fantastic CD.
Arnaldo DeSouteiro / Tribuna Bis
He writes very well, I think.
Kenny Wheeler in 'jazzwise'
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