Harmen Fraanje – Piano
Brice Soniano – Double Bass
Toma Gouband – Drums, Stones, Leaves
heart-warming hypnosis, a piece of silent poetry that you rarely hear’
Guy Peters, Enola Magazine
about
While the trio continuously develops new material to enrich its original repertoire, the essence of the music of this group is perhaps even more about the deep connection between the three musicians than about what is played.
The synergy gets painted by lyricism, harmonies and natural textures, resulting in a unique and disarming sound featuring the extraordinary orchestration of Gouband’s drums with stones, branches and leaves.
Fraanje, Soniano and Gouband are fascinated by the concepts of space and time and explore proportions throughout original compositions and on a more intuitive level in improvisations.
It’s like if there is an open conversation between melody and time, like if pitches are responding to a gravitational impact of rhythm.
It took many years to develop the distinctive sound of the trio, yet the special connection was always there from the very first notes and embodied itself as a constance through the different phases of the band
The trio is deeply inspired by nature phenomenas – like the infinite diversity and beauty of shapes on both micro and macro levels, the appreciation of flow in its multitude of forms – and by cultures of people living in natural environments. Soniano and Gouband traveled to the Equatorial rainforest in Cameroon to experience and celebrate daily life with a population of Baka Pygmies.
And although it might not appear at first listen, this experience with the Baka resonates deeply in the music of the trio.
harmen fraanje
According to the internationally renowned website AllAboutJazz ‘Harmen Fraanje is emerging as one of the most impressive young European pianists of the past decade.’
He leads and co-leads several groups like trio Reijseger Fraanje Sylla, a trio with Brice Soniano and Toma Gouband and a recently founded trio Peltomaa Fraanje Perkola. Besides that he’s a sideman in several groups of Norwegian bass player Mats Eilertsen and member of the Michael Moore Quartet. With these projects he frequently performs at festivals and concert venues throughout the world. Recordings of the projects he’s involved in have been released by eminent labels like ECM, Winter & Winter, Hubro Music, Challenge Jazz.
Harmen collaborated with the likes of Ambrose Akinmusire, Mark Turner, Kenny Wheeler, Arve Henriksen, Thomas Morgan, Tony Malaby, Werner Herzog.
Harmen is in the faculty of the Conservatory of Amsterdam where he teaches principal subject Piano Jazz and ensembles.
brice soniano
‘Soniano is one of the most imaginative and expressive bassists I happened to come across lately and his work on this album is a superb example of the role of the bass in contemporary music; no longer a background support but a soloist of equal standing and importance to the other band members. His tone, technique and ability to converse with his cohorts is nothing short of miraculous.’
Adam Baruch, September 2015
Brice loves to involve himself in musics from different times and cultures. He has been a soloist with the Orchestre de Montpellier for the creation of Mathis Nitshke opera’ Jetzt , and has traveled to the equatorial rain forest of Cameroon to live with a population of Baka pygmies. Brice plays with musicians such as Joachim Badenhorst, Nelson Veras, Ben Sluijs, Lionel Malric, Lionel Beuvens, Levent Yildirim.
toma gouband
Toma Gouband’s instrument is seemingly simple: a horizontal bass drum, whose surface is scattered with tiny bells, blocks of wood, branches and twigs, and a collection of stones from around the world… Pebbles are rolled on the ground, and in place of cymbals – more twigs and stones. Gouband does not add to this assortment of things – neither a computer nor any other electronics; and yet, he creates music which sounds like the most tender, complicated and delicately nuanced electroacoustic pieces, which at the same time retains a deep connection to the most profound and arcane insights about the relationship between music and the natural world. The way Gouband succeeds in this is through pulse. This entire apparatus is animated by an interior pulsation, born from years of research into the possibility of acting and playing with several superimposed simultaneous internal clocks, several mysterious cycles, from which he creates polyrhythmic patterns, weaving sound tissues which are threaded into beautiful temporal fabrics, intertwined with colorful radiant motifs, governed by rules that seems to have been transmitted only to the most devoted of initiates.
more about circles
