While I Was Listening to Tony Buck

Last week I was supposed to play the second from a series of three gigs that were to happen in my solo show at the IFA Galerie in Berlin. The series was titled “Mazen Kerbaj invites X. plus one” and the idea was to invite each time a close collaborator from the city and ask him/her to bring along a guest performer that would remain secret to me and the audience until the night of the gig. The three musicians I invited are Ute Wassermann, Tony Buck and Andrew Lafkas, and I was quite excited (and a bit scared!) to discover whom they will each bring along. For the time being those performances are not cancelled yet, just postponed; the exhibition is still closed but might open again soon with measures and limitations, but the good news is that it will stay in place until August (instead of mid-May) which means there is still a chance to play the three gigs for limited audience.

While I Was Listening to You
Since the beginning of the lockdown, I have been trying to replace some of my missed gigs by related home solos.
In place of the “MK invites X. plus one” gigs I started last month the “While Listening to You” homer solos series with Ute Wassermann. The idea is to record a solo piece while listening through headphones to a solo piece by the other musician. His/her solo piece becomes a score to interpret, as if as if he/she was whispering to me what to play in realtime. I do not try to mimic the music i am listening to though, but rather to play with another musician’s pace, sensibility and sense of structure.
It is both an homage and a an open letter to a close musician that I cannot meet for the time being.

Listening to Tony
This time I recorded a solo while listening to Tony Buck’s Tidal, an unreleased piece that he shared with me for this project.
Tony is a musician I know about ever since I started listening to improv music in the late nineties, seeing him playing for the first time in the Mulhouse festival in 1998 (I was not yet a musician back then) and listening to him on record with many of my heroes or with his fantastic trio The Necks. We later played together a bunch of times in various groups in the late 2000, until I moved to Berlin in 2015. Since then, he is one of my closest partner in crime, be it in our Das B. quartet (with Magda Mayas and Mike Majkowski), our various trios (with Michel Doneda, Sharif Sehanoui Andrew Lafkas, Ingebrigt Håker Flaten…) or in our ongoing duo. Besides, he is a very close friend. For all this, I hope he will like the piece.

About the video
Tony’s piece was not an easy one to play with, and I had to do many takes, often stopping them in the middle. As a result, my favourite take (the last one) was shot quite late, in rather low light, which gives it this bad resolution and some focus problems sometimes; but this is the one with the best music…