Northwind boogy

Milton Court Theatre
19:15-20:00
Performance

 Northwind boogy

Piano duo Anto Pett and Christoph Baumann ‘unfold a magical world of mirrors’ in their free improvisation.

Anto Pett and Christoph Baumann have worked together as a free improvising piano duo since 2010, and have performed several concerts in Europe.

In 2012, they recorded their first CD.  Bart van Rosmalen, a great cellist himself, writes in his short liner notes: “Two grand pianos, the round curves woven into each other. Two focused faces, the master players Christoph Baumann & Anto Pett, unfolding in free improvisation a magical world of mirrors. We hear them as lookalike twins walking with incredibly fast steps through rough city landscapes. They invite us to huge glass buildings with endless reflected images. Here the mirror image starts to live its own life. Here every attack finds its repetition, its counterpoint, its amplification…..”

Free jazz will never be `easy listening` but this disc is so fascinating because as well as being a display of virtuosity it creates sound pictures that invoke awe, paint vivid colours, and communicate humour and much else that is life affirming and inspirational.

Review by Euan Dixon

Anto Pett graduated from Conservatoire of Tallinn (now renamed Estonian Academy of Music and Theatre) as a pianist and composer. Since1987 he has been teaching harmony and improvisation in the Estonian Academy of Music and Theatre. In 1988 he discovered that improvisation was to become his main means of artistic expression. Since 2002 A. Pett is a regular professor of contemporary improvisation in the Estonian Academy of Music and Theatre. During his over twenty five years of teaching A. Pett has developed an original concert improvisation teaching method that works successfully in the teaching process with all instruments and singers. Many of his students have been awarded prizes at the Leipzig Improvisation competition.

Anto Pett has presented his teaching method and given masterclasses in many music schools in Estonia and in many music academies and conservatoires abroad, including Helsinki, Stockholm, Oslo, Haag, Utrecht, Hamburg, Odense, Paris, Bordeaux, Marseille, Riga, Vilnius, Antwerp, Cardiff, Glasgow, Warsaw, Krakow, Gdansk, Brigthon, Vienna, Evanston and London.

Christoph Baumann (born 1954) is an improvising musician, pianist, composer and professor for Jazz piano and improvisation at the Music Department of Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts, Switzerland. His artistic activities include a vast field of improvising and composing approaches in which he relates various styles in experimental dramaturgic structures. He composed for various settings and disciplines like film, dance, theatre and radio plays, performed as leader or sideman at festivals around the world and has documented his creative work on various recordings.