Here´s my new Band with CD out in November 2010!

CHRISTIAN WEIDNER QUARTETT

Christian Weidner – Saxophone
Colin Vallon – Piano
Henning Sieverts –Bass
Samuel Rohrer –Drums

visit pirouetrecords

...for more info and sound (german)

...for more info and sound (english)

...for press kit in german

...for press kit in english

Dear listener!

This is my new quartet which I founded in 2009. I brought three fellow musicians from Switzerland and Germany into the band, with whom I ´ve played in several bands before: Colin Vallon – p, Henning Sieverts – b and Samuel Rohrer – dr.

We have just recorded our new album for the label Pirouet (www.pirouetrecords.com), which will be released this autumn 2010. It´s called "The Inward Song". As the title „The Inward Song“ suggests – the songs are mainly quiet with an intimate sound, leading from places that feel like home to strange mysterious places with the band exploding to pieces...finding it´s way back (maybe), weirdly transformed.
The music I´ve written for this band is strongly connected to the musicians who play in it. We all share the same approach to playing, with great love for sound and leaving space and making new discoveries. My influences reach from Arvo Pärt to György Ligeti, from Joni Mitchell to corsican folk music - I like the simple surface which allows the musicians to go deep into sound and adventure.

A few more words about my fellow musicians:
Colin Vallon is switzerlands great new piano – star, soon to be working with his trio all over the place. He lives in Bern, working a lot with the singer Elina Duni, as well.
Samuel Rohrer is from switzerland, too. He plays a lot with Malcolm Braff, Claudio Puntin and many others, I guess 200 concerts a year.
Henning Sieverts is a strong voice on bass in Germany. He is leading his own band „Symmetry“. He recently received the „Echo Jazz Award 2010“ as best bass player for his Symmetry – release „Blackbird“ (out on Pirouet, as well).

here an infotext in german:

"The Inward Song“
„Musik mache ich, um das Innerste der Dinge sprechen zu lassen“ – so beschreibt der Berliner Altsaxophonist Christian Weidner sein musikalisches Credo.
„The Inward Song“ heißt dann auch seine aktuelle CD, eingespielt mit einem brillanten deutsch-schweizerischen Quartett mit Colin Vallon (Klavier), Henning Sieverts (Bass) und Samuel Rohrer (Schlagzeug).
Wie das CD-Titelstück „The Inward Song“, so sind auch die anderen Eigenkompositionen der CD innig, nach innen gewendet:
„Die Stücke sind mehr innerlich gefunden als konstruiert.
Ich mag das Einfache, das Vertraute als Startpunkt zu abenteuerlichen Entdeckungen in der Tiefe...“(Weidner).
Das Gefühlsspektrum ist weit: es reicht von einem Abendlied und einem stillen Psalm über Hymnen bis hin zu „feurigen Tollheiten“ und zu Stücken „für die
über der Erde schwebenden und beim Schweben geerdeten“.
Schwebend und gleichzeitig geerdet – so ist auch Weidners Sound am Altsaxophon: Er ist weich, luftig, freundlich und hell, bestimmt und klar. Dabei ist der Raum zwischen den gespielten Tönen, die Stille davor und danach, mindestens so wichtig wie die Töne selbst. Der Hörer beginnt, diese Frei-Räume innerlich singend zu füllen.
Formal bewegen sich Weidners Kompositionen von traditionellen Songformen über offenere Strukturen bis hin zu graphischen Spielanweisungen, wichtige Einflüsse sind Hindemith, Pärt, Ligeti, Messiaen, aber auch die Altmeister wie Bach oder die mittelalterliche sakrale Musik (wunderbar in die Jetztzeit überführt auf Weidners Debut-CD „Choral“ von 2004)
Seinen Mitmusikern lässt Christian Weidner stets ein Maximum an (Mit)gestaltungsfreiheit. Und die wird von Colin Vallon, Henning Sieverts und Samuel Rohrer kreativ und inspiriert genutzt.
In diesem Quartett treffen sich vier Musiker, die über das verfügen, was viele anstreben, aber nur wenige erreichen: eine eigenständige Klang-Persönlichkeit.

WEIDNER PALESANO SCHRÖTELER

Christian Weidner – saxophone, electronics
Antonio Palesano – piano, synthesizer, electronics
Daniel Schröteler – drums, electronics

Weidner, Palesano and Schröteler founded the trio in year 2000. They started with intense and sweaty sessions at Weidners Berlin-located Waldwinkel Space, creating their own way of melodious jazz avantgarde. After several homemade releases they were invited by the Pirouet record label to record the “CHORAL” – album in december 2003. They went on release Tour in Germany in 2005.

Christian Weidner’s album “CHORAL” combines the basis of traditional music – folk and gospel – and elements of jazz music and improvisation with a certain highly precisioned spirit of avant-garde, a spirit searching for topical concepts and values endeavoring after adequate phrasing.
An expressive musicality is again and again led back anew with subtlety and captivation to channels set by the composer thus making this outstanding, very mature and independent album a meritorious stroke of luck.

This acoustic trio, featuring Christian Weidner on sax, Antonio Palesano on piano and Daniel Schröteler on drums, has several years of common and definitive experience. An experience that creates an accurate and extremely artistic network of intuitively exchanged signals enabling the perfection of a highbrow and abstract treatment of the liturgical theme in conception.

In sixteen songs we experience the sequence of a multidimensional attempt to come to terms with an aesthetic and spiritual complex by analysis, repetition and transformation, a sequence we are all familiar with somehow or another. “To me choral is a term related to my personal origin. The melody of a ritual song, the breath and pulse of lyrics and syllables sung in a formal ceremony. “This aura and this dimension of music fascinate me”. (Christian Weidner)

Based on the preceding intensively intellectual abstraction, new directions for the development of themes and style of playing set by the composer present themselves to the musicians. These rooms fill in brilliantly free form on a most high level, relaxed, abundant with subtle stagings and perfectly set accents, ambitious in its range of tempos and modulations, from repetitive to appellative (“Teo”). The whole creation remains unerringly firm in its balance on a sharp edge between composition and improvisation.

The arising tone poems lead the listener to complex, powerfully melodious stratifications and fragmentary sequential arpeggios through which the actual theme remains visible, the interrelationship between minor and major, fragment and whole within higher harmonics. “What counts, is to fathom out your origins and your musical home and to lead it with dedication and risk to a subjective message”. (Christian Weidner).

Text by Andrea Leiber

CD release: Christian Weidner / “CHORAL” (PIT3009) (2004)
www.pirouetrecords.com
pdf info download
hires photo

DUO: WEIDNER PALESANO

Christian Weidner – saxophone, electronics
Antonio Palesano – piano, synthesizer, electronics

Weidner and Palesano present an intimate duo program, dealing with new statements on beloved traditions. Rooted in the wide fields of both Jazz and European contemporary music they let the music material flow through their homegrown music morphing channels, always searching for new knobs to turn.

pdf info download

ROYCE

Simon Stockhausen – synth, sampler, electr, ssax, voc
Christian Weidner – saxes, electr, dictaphone, voc

Simon and Christian met in the Berlin Workshop Orchestra in 1999. Since then they started recording duo sessions together. Later on Daniel Schröteler, Kalle Kalima and Dane Alderson joined the group. Meanwhile they played concerts in Germany and France, did film music productions and received a recording sponsorship by the Berlin senat in 2004.
Experienced in various backgrounds like jazz, ethnic music and contemporary avantgarde they explore and create without stilistic boundaries.

llisten to ROYCE on
www.myspace.com/christianweidner