I’ve Been Thinking of You Every Day

Each occasion to play music with Ute Wassermann, in private or in concerts, in duo or in one of our various other projects, has been a great pleasure for me ever since we played together for the first time. She is a musicians with whom I feel very comfortable to play. The natural understanding we share makes her one of those rare musicians that I can improvise with “blindly”, knowing that anything I will do, whatever decision I will make will be matched on the spot with a tailor-made decision/sound/proposition from her side. This is of course the job description of any (good) improviser, and what makes the music we play so demanding and so rewarding at the same time. But there are these very few musicians with whom the connection happens on another level; we do no effort whatsoever to try to meet each other. We just play, and it works. Ute is definitely one of those musicians for me (the others that come to my mind are Sharif Sehnaoui and Tony Buck); still, I wasn’t expecting much to come from our Telepathic Duos.

The Telepathic Duos Series
A couple of days after the beginning of the Covid-19 lockdown, Ute Wassermann and myself started thinking of ways to play together from a distance (like all other musicians in the world i suppose). After dismissing the video conference option, we decided to work on new duo recordings; but how to achieve the spontaneity and the surprise of improvisation without being together? We discussed many options, most of them variations on the inevitable: “I record something and I send it to you, you add something and send it back, etc.” The problem was that one musician had always to start the piece and thus to give it the impulse and the overall direction. A few days later we settled on the following format: each one of us records a one minute solo every day while thinking of the other; these solos will later be put together as is, with no further alterations, cuts and/or overdubs. After one week, we put the first 7 minutes together to see where it was going, and we were both gladly surprised by the result. We continued the experience, and it proved more and more rewarding, to the point that we decided to release all the pieces in an album to come. Meanwhile, I am happy to share with you the first piece here.