HYDERABAD: The city is suddenly witnessing a lot of jazz concerts. While some have presented fusion beats, a few others have experimented with out-of-the-box concepts. Cologne-based Jazz band ‘Tubes & Wires’, who performed in the city this Sunday, played some offbeat compositions inspired by science fiction. The band founder Neils Klein played an interesting, but complex musical instrument called theremin, which is an ancient synthesizer and is played without any physical contact. No wonder then that the music that emanated appeared to be somewhere in a parallel universe on a distant star. Neils laughed hearing this and added, “It’s a Russian instrument which works on magnetic fields. For higher notes, I need to lift my hands away from it and the music just flows.” He admits that it is difficult to play this instrument but he does for that special effect in the tunes.
It’s not just this instrument that adds different notes to the quartet performance, the band members also infused a bit of Rock and Icelandic notes in the composition called ‘Layer’ inspired by the Rock band Sigur Ros from Reykjavík. But the speciality of Tubes & Wires lies in the blend of sci-fi music which appears in several of their compositions. The number ‘Cam Redo’ was inspired by a spaceship which was composed as a medley of high notes, but the tunes contained a bit too-loud drum beats and appeared to interfere the smooth flux of the music. But why sci-fi music in jazz? Explains Neils, “There was a phase in my life when I was reading a lot of sci-fi writers like Philip K Dick and Stanis Lem.
This was almost 10 years ago. I got ideas about the development of humanity.” He draws the sap of his music from the philosophical side of it the parallel universe that is. The name Tubes & Wires denotes clarinets used and different loops of electric coils used to plug the instruments. The band had Lars Duppler on e-piano and synthesizer, Hanno Busch on guitar and bass and Ralf Gessler on drums. The band next went to Karachi, Pakistan for their performance.
— Saima Afreen
saima@newindianexpress
@Sfreen