Florian Walter
Context
When: 26.08.2019
Where: Oslo, Norway
What: Enneagram, concerts in semi-public spaces, the hechtyphone and more
Copyright © Sabine Niggeman
C: You are going to play a solo concert with your own invented instrument, the hechtyphone. We’ll get back to that. But first we got to know: Who is Florian Walter and what do you do?
F: If I knew! Well, I’m a German saxophone player based in the Western part of Germany, living in Essen 1/4 of the year, and the rest of the year I’m touring around in Germany, Europe, and for some years now also Japan. So yeah, it’s like the typical improvising musician’s lifestyle in a way. When I’m in Essen, I also organize concerts and try to establish a scene together with some other people.
C: I want to get back to the scene in Essen, but first I’d like to know where you studied?
F: I studied in Essen, actually, so that’s what brought me there. But I was also born in this region, we call it the Ruhr area. It’s this kind of post industrial area where there used to be a lot of coal mines. I was born in Hamm, which is a bit on the outskirts, a bit more rural, but still very much a part of this former working area.
I studied at the Folkwang University. I started with Education, History, Saxophone and Contemporary music composition.
C: To me you seem like the average improviser. That is to say — every musician has a different mix of things they do, and that seems to be what is average. What are your main projects right now, and what is your role in them?
F: There’s a mixture of band concepts, but also some solo work that I do. Usually when I play solo, I play the alto saxophone, contrabass saxophone, hechtyphone and sometimes also contrabass clarinet — and sometimes also soprano saxophone, but that’s more rare these days. Tonight is actually the first time I will play solely on the hechtyphone.
When it comes to band projects I just joined this band which has been existing without me already for some years now. From my perspective as an improviser I would call it more of a mainstream jazz band, but with some edge. That is to say, the average audience would probably think of it as super extreme experimental, but we play pieces and composed music, and the improvisation is kind of formal. So for me it’s a step back to where I started in a way. The band is called Malstrom, and it’s a band we tour a lot with this year, and also next year. It’s running really well right now.
Another one is called Super Jazz Sandwich. This is a project which is a culmination of different ideas. Me and the other two guys, Flavio Zanuttini on trumpet and Simon Camatta on drums, are bringing together concepts of free improvisation and the jazz tradition, so we play pieces with a lot of freedom in them, but still rooted in the jazz tradition.
C: The American jazz tradition, or the European contemporary tradition, or?
F: Different. It is based on a psychological concept from the 60s. At least it was written down in the 60s, but it is called an Enneagram. It’s kind of an obscure thing, and I would put some questions mark next to the whole concept. But anyway, we found out about it, and the basic ideas is that you have 9 base characters that can in themselves split up into 9 levels and 3 directions: the healthy one, the very good one and the very bad one. It is quite complex. A year ago now we started to write pieces for each of the 9 characters.
In this system an important part is transition — to move from one character to the other. As far as I’ve understood it is that throughout your life you start on one of these characters and then you develop through all of the 9 characters in order to make your life complete, in a way.
So we keep this perspective, transitioning through different themes. The reason we call it Super Jazz Sandwich is because in a traditional sense you have a theme to improvise on, and we wanted to establish that kind of feeling, but with free improvisation, and it’s quite interesting. We split up to write the pieces, so each of us wrote 3 pieces.
The stylistic horizon is quite broad. Some pieces are very much rooted in the American free jazz tradition, there are game pieces, more contemporary European pieces, and some oriental influences as well. So it’s quite diverse.
I’m working a lot with Simon, who also lives in Essen. We also run a label together, Umland Records. You know — all the average improvising musician things! I actually like that term «average improviser». I get more and more used to seeing these activities that we do, and that there are huge similarities throughout the world when it comes to organizing ones professional lives, more so than differences, actually.
Then I’m playing in a band which I’m not organizing myself, and I’m very proud of being part of that band, because it is really amazing. It’s called The Dorf and is based in Dortmund. The Dorf is roughly a 30 piece orchestra, but very obscure line-up: two drummers, three electric guitars, three electronic guys, theremin, and a lot of reed players, a singer and a string quartet. Jan Klare, a saxophone player from Münster, writes the music. A large part of it is composed and/or conceptualized, but there is always room for improvisational actions.
The Dorf has been existing for 12 years now. During my first year at school in Essen, there was a festival in Dortmund, and that was one of the first concerts that The Dorf played. At that time I was only playing hard bop, listening to a lot of Kenny Garret stuff, but I wanted to check out something else at the festival. When they started to play, I was completely blown away. I thought to myself that «one day, I want to join that band», and some years later, one of the saxophone players in the band had to move to another place in Germany, and I was asked to take the free seat. I was very happy about that.
Jan is still organizing and writing the music. For some years now we’ve opened it up and made sort of a scene out of the orchestra. It’s not only Essen/Dortmund or the Ruhr area, but now also people from Cologne, from Münster and other parts in Western Germany. Sometimes also people from Berlin, southern parts of Germany, and even musicians from other countries join in.
It’s quite an active scene developing out of the ensemble. Different bands are coming out of it (which is almost a given when it consists of 30 people) and we’re organizing a festival. And then Umland Records is releasing the music. It’s not a political thing, but the two are connected in a way. The Dorf means «village» and Umland translates into «environs» or «surroundings». So yeah — it’s different things: a label, a festival, an idea.
C: Do you get to travel around with that band? I play in band which is half the size, and it’s still hard to get around with that. Do you have to be 30 people to do a gig?
F: No, we don’t. In the beginning it was more like that these 30 people formed a collective or a pool of musicians, and whenever there is a gig (there is one gig every month in Dortmund, sometimes also elsewhere), Jan writes an e-mail to everyone and asks us who wants to come. Then we get everything from 10-30 people. The smallest constellation we ever had was a trio.
The pieces are composed in a way so that they work in both small and large constellations. The last couple of years the vibe is that everyone is taking it quite seriously, and so even though we are not necessarily 30 musicians on stage, we’re around 25 on average.
Traveling is an issue. We have some support from time to time, but it would be nice if it would be a bit more, actually.
C: (Wouldn’t it always?)
F: In the region of Western Germany we play quite regularly, and steadily in other cities throughout Germany. So far it is really hard to do tours abroad because of the travel costs. We did a very nice Austrian tour some years ago, traveling by bus, and we also made a record out of that. There’s a plan to go to the Baltics, but we’ll see.
C: Come to Norway!
F: Yeah! We found that the problem is not so much about the fee, but the catering, hotel and of course travels, which scares organizers off.
C: Alright, so we’ve been through The Dorf, Super Jazz Sandwich and Malstrom. What else?
F: I want to add that I was already a fan of Malstrom before they called me. It’s really nice when someone’s got a band running, and then you get the call and get asked to join. I knew the drummer from before, and we’re having a really nice time together, also on the road.
This is something I’m getting more and more interested in: Not only playing good music, but to find constellations of people who are really working well together. For example I’m organizing a series which has been around for almost 10 years now. It’s called Trinkhallen Tour Ruhr, which is a concept where we play improvised music in convenience stores, or semi-public space, as we call it. It’s in the Ruhr area, and these stores are quite popular. It’s a culture around these stores, so it was a good idea to start there.
The series got more and more popular over the years, and we’ve had different line-ups of people. We started out as a trio, and then someone left and others came to, and now it’s more like a collective with three bass clarinets, camera, film maker, photographer, someone helping out with the organization, and we always invite guests from other performing fields as well as other musicians. We made an international version just recently in England and Belgium.
What I’m really happy about is that when we’re on tour with this project, and you are staying together in an apartment for a week, it’s not only about the music. The music is good, it works for us and for the audience. But when the things around the music works in an easy, professional and friendly way, it’s such a benefit.
That aspect is probably what I enjoy most about this job. The fact that you are able to work with different constellations which are, in the best situation, all consisting of cool people. Everyday you can work with different groups of people and bring something from one group to the other, and you learn from each other in an indirect collective, in a way, even though you don’t know the other people.
C: So you feel like there is a lot of cross pollination in your scene?
F: In our scene, for sure, but also on the border to other scenes as well. I don’t only work in the Ruhr area scene, and so whenever I’m bumping up against the scenes in Cologne or Berlin, or Tokyo for that matter, I can bring those strategies back with me. I guess cross pollination is a good word for that, yes.
C: Let’s rewind back to the Trinkhallen-project. Is it also more like a dynamic collective?
F: It was flexible over the years. This wasn’t something that we initially planned, it just happened. I started it together with my friend Felix Fritsche, and then we first got together with a double bass player who got replaced by different bass clarinet players over the years. Now for some time it’s pretty much a fixed line-up with me, Felix and Lutz Streun, this trio works just perfect. We didn’t have a plan to do it as long as we have been doing it, nor did we plan to change the line-up all the time. It just happened, and I’m very happy with it now, that it is a bit of flexibility also in the core line-up.
We’ve been doing this in former coal industrial areas, like Ruhr area, parts of Belgium and parts of England, but right now we’re working on a follow-up project for next year which will happen in more public spaces, but also more obscure places, like people’s backyards. It’s a mapping concept, basically. And there are also some other concepts where we are invited for festivals, because we know very well how to work in these public space situation. There’s a German word «Vermittlung», which I really don’t have a good translation for in English. It’s not educating, but more like the ability to establish a contact with people so that it is a bit easier for them to connect with the music.
My hope is that we can establish this project in a way that we get invited to more places, and that we can do it more than only once a year.
C: With this project it seems to me that you’ve found a new arena to get in touch with the audience. I saw the magazine you did for this project’s 10th anniversary. From what I could get from that, it just really seems like people enjoy it a lot, even though it is this experimental improvised music.
F: This was was quite striking to me. It was the idea in the very beginning that «hey — this is beautiful music». Maybe people aren’t familiar with it, but I myself can enjoy it so why shouldn’t other people also be able to enjoy it? You are running concerts as well, and you know how you sometimes can get these situation where people are standing around and looking like «ugh, what is this?», like they get offended. Of course, that also happens sometimes with us, but in like 95% of the cases it has worked out really well.
We put some effort into making clear for the audience that it is OK not to like it. We want to talk with the people afterwards, and when you establish a situation which is friendly and open, where it is OK to say that you didn’t like parts of it, they don’t feel that they will be called stupid for not liking it. This is also a value. If you go to these established institutionalized places (at least in Germany), like philharmonics, theaters or sometimes even jazz clubs, there is so much standardized behavior there. If I imagine myself going to a jazz club for the very first time, I would be super turned down by all this standard behavior that I don’t know anything about. Maybe I just came in there by chance, or someone recommended it or something.
C: There are these social norms that you feel you have to follow in order to be a part of that scene or in order to listen to and understand that type of music.
F: For me it always worked better if you say «it’s OK if you didn’t like it, but give us a chance to explain». And then I don’t mean to explain it in a technical or musical theoretical fashion, but to go one step further and talk about why we are doing this music, where the inspiration comes from and why we love it. Of course you still have to accept that people still say «Well, for me that doesn’t work».
C: Before we run out of time, we need to talk about the instrument you are playing tonight, the hechtyphone.
F: The instrument is an invention which we did two and a half years ago. I was working with some dancers for a dance theatre production. A part of the stage design was consisting of bells from various brass instruments, and an artist made a landscape out of these. I was playing the saxophone, but at that time I started working on the reed-trumpet. The reed-trumpet is a quite old concept, stemming back to the 60s-70s, and the main idea is that you play trumpet with a saxophone mouthpiece and make it sound like a trumpet, basically.
I was working a bit on that and was experimenting on producing different sounds. At the time I was turned on to extended techniques. The problem with the saxophone is that the sound goes into all directions as soon as you open a key. So for certain techniques you are limited to one note — the lowest on the instrument. That’s different with brass instruments. I was thinking that in my next life I want to play the trumpet because there are so many other possible sounds. But then I realized that «ah — I can just play it with a saxophone mouthpiece». That’s when I started to work on it.
We decided to have this as an interlude in the dance theater project. The artist who built the stage worked with me on putting more bells on the trumpet. In the first phase it was just for the optics, as a visual aspect. We put different bells on different valves of the instrument, and then I had a backpack with tubes coming out from it. It looked quite fancy in a way. The result was me walking across the stage and making some funny sounds, so yeah — mainly a visual thing.
But then I realized that maybe there is a way to control them, and then I started to work on the actual instrument. Another friend of mine, Rochus Aust (check out this guy’s website!), who started as a trumpet player but who is now more into conceptual art. He introduced me to a trumpet maker in Cologne. The current result is basically a pocket trumpet with 3 bells, a trombone slide, there’s part of a french horn in it, a bassoon crook coming out, and I play everything with a special developed sax mouthpiece made by Torben Snekkestad. I met him during this research, and he is one of very few people worldwide who are actually playing a reed trumpet, meaning that he can control and play music with it. He’s quite an impressive guy. Originally a saxophone player, but it is amazing what he can get out of that instrument as well.
Copyright © Caroline Schlüter
I’m now working on a third version of the instrument. I want a fourth bell going pointing in the direction of my back, because I’ve had some situations where I want to work with the room acoustics even more. There’s actually a concept for that from the early 19th century, used as an effect trumpet for music theatre, like an echo trumpet. Then I’m thinking about getting some more mechanics in order to get some more flexibility. It is getting more and more complex to play it, but I still feel a bit limited sometimes. There could be more variety to the pitches, but still I’m quite happy now.
C: I have heard you play it a little bit, but not in the format that we’re going to hear you tonight. What about the name?
F: Hecht is a fish (pike in English). If you say to someone that they’re a «hecht», it means that they are very cool. My girlfriend and I had this thing where we called each other «hecht», just for fun, and in the process of this thing becoming an instrument, I just thought it was a good idea to use that.
C: To finish off, I would like to ask you about your feelings and thoughts about the social and/or political aspect of music. This is a big topic to bring up at the end, and we have limited time, but if you have some reflections about the challenges that lies ahead for improvised music.
F: I have a lot of thoughts about that. If I start with the social aspect, I would say that music is a very good tool to establish social interaction, and this was one of the main reasons why we established this Trinkhallen-tour concept. For me, improvised music is a tool, and not so much an aesthetic. Either the music is good or it is bad, and I really don’t care at all if it is improvised or composed or algorithmical or anything. Either it touches me, tells me something about the world and the person playing it. I really don’t care how it is produced, if you know what I mean.
In Germany sometimes there is a tendency in the tradition of improvised music to claim that with improvised music we can do exactly the same thing as contemporary composers and ensemble players, just without the sheet music. I always understood this as sort of devaluation of the composers’ work and found this position to be quite ridiculous. Of course there are so many examples of incredibly complex and composed improvisations, but to put the value of improvised against composed music never made sense to me, and seems to me like comparing apples to pears.
So for me, improvised music is a very good tool, but you still have to find your aesthetics in using that tool. Music, or improvised music, is as much a tool for bringing up social context. When you play in an ensemble, there is also an interaction happening on stage, and you can somehow present your own version of social interaction for the audience, and maybe they find something which helps them in their lives and realities. For me it’s very hard to tell, because I can’t get rid of the sort-of-technical perspective of a musician myself, also when I attend concerts.
My feeling is that when you go into a context where people have no experience with improvised music, that this happens a lot. For example there was a very interesting situation when we played in a public space in a small city in Western Germany, and there was this one guy who came and listened and had a lot of fun. He was homeless. After the concert he came and said that he loved the music, that it reminded him of krautrock, but the most important thing, he said, is that you take care of each other on stage. That struck me quite deep, and for me that is what it is about: To make everyone else look good, and if you have your spot then make the best out of it. But it’s not about your brilliant playing, but to create a context where the other people you play with look and sound good, and make them feel good. That is something that maybe transfers to the audience.
Right now I’m just coming from Weimar where I did a project with Rochus Aust, the guy I developed the hechtyphone with. It was like a 50 piece line-up with different performers from all fields. It was great music, great installation, but the most important part was that everyone was taking so much care about the others and really just trying to present ourselves as an ensemble, as a group of people, who either by chance or intention, are bound together and have to deal with it.
Sometimes you are performing with people you don’t like, or you’ve had an argument with. But you’re on stage, and you need to make it happen and make it work. This is something which can serve as a model for society.