Martin Kuchen

These are difficult times to be an idealist in what concerns the social function of music. Do really the art of sounds can change the world, something that many believed possible in the Sixties and Seventies?

Martin Küchen is naive and desperate, and maybe only because of that one might feel that each of his albums has a message. If this message may seem political, its sense is profoundly about human undertakings, and "Epileptical West", recorded live in Coimbra, Portugal, during the Jazz ao Centro festival, is no exception.

Bassist Per Zanussi expands his band to 13 players including saxophonists Jonas Kullhammar, Martin Kuchen, Jorgen Mathisen, Jketil Moster, guitarist Stian Westerhus, &c. for an amazing set of compositions on the edge of modern jazz. The album was recorded live at Nasjonal Jazzscene in Oslo, 2011.

No, Martin Küchen isn’t a composer of programmatic music, conceived only to accompany silent movies, dancers or stage actors, but even if this wonderful Swedish saxophonist also had made music for theatre, dance and cinema, his main work in the fields of jazz and free improvised music has as a personal characteristic the particularity of telling stories.

It was a special configuration of the Swedish band Angles that leader Martin Kuchen brought to the Ljubljana Jazz Festival in its 2011 edition. To the instrumental formation of the sextet was added a second saxophonist, Eirik Hegdal (baritone and sopranino), and a pianist, Alexander Zethson.