hayden chisholm: alto sax and bass
nils wogram: trombone
matt penman: double bass
jochen rückert: drums

Editor's info:
For nearly a hundred and twenty years, jazz has been the flexible quintessence of constant renewal. What is avant-garde today can turn into tradition tomorrow, but anyone who loses sight of the tradition is holding bad cards for the renewal. In the age of globalization and virtualization, artistic niches and epicenters begin to break down in every conceivable cultural experience. That is precisely were a band like Fourscore sees its chance. Fourscore is four young German jazz musicians, and yet they have no use for labels like Young German Jazz or the Next Generation. Four-score can live with people liking them or not, sharing their view of jazz or not. Be-cause they have a story to tell.

But what does it mean to say a young, almost unknown German bad stands entirely for it-self? After all, Fourscore is not reinventing jazz. On the contrary, every note reveals a devoted respect for jazz tradition. More than almost anyone else in his generation, guitarist Alexander Jung has internalized the playing of guitar legend Jim Hall. Saxophonist Tobias Meinhart makes no secret of his admiration for Seamus Blake. Their music need not have been made in Germany. Fourscore is liberated from the dogma of Euro jazz. In their way of playing, the in-stant of immediate musical performance expands to fill half a century. They are traditionalists in the best sense of the word, skillfully skirting the tempting traps of retro and revival.

It took the young band four years to learn their own vocabulary. In fast-living times like ours, that is an enormously long time to transform arbitrariness into originality and models for imitation into one’s own idiom. In the face of ever more rapid succession of alleged “next generations,” who can still summon up that much patience? But Jung, Meinhart, and Co. know very well that the sweet days of youth vanish quickly. If the quartet is now finally daring to put out its debut album, .......
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