Nils Wogram / Root 70

Luxury Habits

Buy / Listen

2017 / nwog 017

Line-Up:

Nils Wogram – Trombone

Hayden Chisholm – Alto Sax

Matt Penman – Bass

Jochen Rueckert – Drums

After four "conceptual works" releases Root 70 enters the free and spontaneous space again. Luxury Habits is an album on rhythm and unexpected metric transformation. Take the risk and get surprised.

Photo: Ulla C. Binder

Times change, and with them, the themes and credo of all artists – as long as their antennas continue to receive signals. Even the first bars of the opener of Luxury Habits announce that Root 70 is moving differently. Indeed, the motto for the new CD could be “the party’s over.” Never before has the band sounded so serious. Although here, serious does not mean the cerebral tendency in some of contemporary jazz, but rather the seriousness with which a subject is exhibited, and the depth with which the intentions of four musicians merge. Indeed, the music on Luxury Habits did not even have a conceptual plan. On the contrary, unlike on the last records of Root 70, Wogram wanted to do in a space devoid of concepts what a jazz musician likes to do: to simply play.

Wogram, Chisholm, Penman and Rueckert combine the gift of questioning themselves. Individually and as a band, which, in this case, amounts to a close circle of friends. “The album has emerged from a band dynamic,” says Wogram. “We talked intensively about the concepts of the past few years and agreed that we wanted to take a little more risk. We needed a new challenge.” The collective risk of precise blurring is a rare commodity in an epoch so fond of the post-factual. Root 70 lean far out the window. We have enough answers. Root 70 are four individualists who merge into an inseparable identity and once again ask the right questions in their music.