Nils Wogram / Root 70

Wise Men Can Be Wrong

Buy / Listen

2015 / nwog 014

Line-Up:

Nils Wogram – Trombone

Hayden Chisholm – Alto Sax

Matt Penman – Bass

Jochen Rueckert – Drums

Root 70 conceptual work IV. The first Root 70 standard album featuring our favorite songs from the great american songbook.

Photo: Ulla C. Binder

How do they say it so nicely in the film classic The Big Lebowski? “Strong men also cry.” And just as strong men can cry, so can wise men err. However, Nils Wogram and its long-term group Root 70 are, however, one hundred percent on track, once again. Jazz – and who wanted to doubt this – has been the most stable form of music in the last 120
years, and yet its personnel are constantly fluctuating. Few bands stay together longer than it takes them to make one record and go on one tour together. Firmly established groups, working for decades with the same band members, are more the exception than the rule. One of these bands is Root 70 with Nils Wogram on trombone, Hayden Chisholm on saxophone, Matt Penmanon bass and Jochen Rückert on drums. After 15 years of active duty, the band does not need to be introduced anymore: it is a standard, a benchmark in German jazz and beyond.

Sooner or later, a special question is inevitable in such a constellation: where do we come from? In their search for answers, Root 70 has arrived at standards. To all those prophecies of doom, about who needs five-millionth standards album, Wogram throws back a joyous “So what!” With a magic carpet of imagination, the four musicians glide through the age-old songs of Billy Strayhorn, Cole Porter, Henry Mancini or Jerome Kern as if they had thought of them only a half an hour earlier. And then? Cram these classics in the sophistication boiler and then in the arrangement centrifuge? No! The humor and the dance of the pieces are unique. The difference to conventional standards albums is the attitude with which they serve these classics. And the circle to The Big Lebowski now closes. The most complex situations are explained here laughably easy.