In Between Spaces: Complex Collaborations #3: Trio Ivoire w/ Dobet Gnahoré und Nainy Diabaté & Eve Risser

With Complex Collaborations, the event series In Between Spaces presents different collaborations between musicians from different regions of Africa, the African diaspora and Europe: exciting musical hybrids between jazz, noise, improv, experimental music and danceable pop. In addition to the concerts, talks and interviews on the artistic process, the challenges of collaboration, the reception and economy of the projects, as well as a collaboration with a Cologne primary school are planned.

The first concert evening of "Complex Collaborations #3" spans the spectrum from transcultural jazz to a brute trance board: The Trio Ivoire - with Cologne pianist Hans Lüdemann, Ivorian balaphone master Aly Keita and fine percussionist Christian Thomé has singer Dobet Gnahoré as guest. Nainy Diabaté, who carries on her family's griot tradition, and the exceptional French pianist Eve Risser, with a penchant for preparations, minimalist rhythms and imaginative harmonies, present the German premiere of their first duo programme. The Tunisian-French band Ifriqiyya Electrique takes the audience to ritualistic heights with their overwhelming Post-Industrial Sufi Trance Rock.

The second evening is even more colourful: the trio Mother Tongue with pianist Oscar Jan Hoogland, singer Mola Sylla and drummer Frank Rosaly invent with warmth and serene intensity floating states between African tradition, improvisational experimentation and free jazz. Basque punk-avant-garde activists Billy Bao, led by noise musician and artist Mattin, follow up their fabulous 2014 album "Lagos Sessions" in a clash with bassist Margarida Garcia and kuduro producer DJ Marfox. With their long-standing project Burkina Electric, four musicians and dancers from Burkina Faso and Ivory Coast and cultural border crosser Lukas Ligeti combine traditional West African music and concepts of Western avant-garde, Afro-pop, electronica and dance.

Trio Ivoire w/ Dobet Gnahoré
This revival of Trio Ivoire is a minor sensation - or at least a major delight. TRIO IVOIRE fuses personal roots from the traditions of jazz, European and African music. The combination of balaphon, piano, drums and electronics creates a unique contemporary sound. Trio Ivoire transports the traditional African balaphone into a modern musical world, at the same time discovering new colours for the piano. A joyful play of three extraordinary musical personalities between traditions, visions and experiments, in which creative energies arise above all where African polyrhythms and European polyphony combine, or where contrasts are emphasized. Hans Lüdemann met balaphone master Aly Keita on a solo tour in West Africa's Côte d'Ivoire in 1999 - the prelude to a history spanning more than 20 years in which Trio Ivoire - currently with drummer Christian Thomé - has set standards for transcultural musical collaboration. On "Complex Collaborations", the band revisits their collaboration with the outstanding Ivorian singer (and Grammy winner) Dobet Gnahoré, which began in 2006!

Nainy Diabaté & Eve Risser
Nainy Diabate and Eve Risser met and grew to love each other in Mali. The Malian singer, who, contrary to her parents' original intentions, continues her family's griot tradition, and the exceptional French pianist with a penchant for preparations, minimalist rhythms and imaginative harmonies present the German premiere of their first joint duo programme, following the collaboration of Eve Risser's Red Desert Orchestra with Nainy Diabaté Kaladjula Band.
Pianist Eve Risser is one of the most outstanding young musicians on the European jazz scene. She explores her instrument in a tireless search for new sonic, percussive and rhythmic possibilities. With her Red Desert Orchestra and Malian singer Nainy Diabaté and her all-female Kaladjula Band, Risser has created the large-scale project "Kogoba Basigui", a conversation between a modern experimental Western big band and the mature art of Malian women musicians. Nainy Diabate grew up in a Malian griot family and, although her parents are not musicians and had other plans for Nainy as well, she pushed through her desire to become a musician. With Eve Risser, Diabate shares not only a love of musical experimentation, but also a commitment to a stronger role and self-empowerment for women in music.

Ifriqiyya Èlectrique
Blood, sweat, spirituality, trance. Fierce, moving, insistent - an overwhelming sensory experience. Ifriqiyya Electrique combine the evocative Sufi trance rhythms of a Saharan ritual with the electrically charged force of contemporary post-industrial rock sounds.
Their sound is inspired by musical experiences that eliminate the safe distance between musicians and audience. The two musicians Gianna Greco and François R. Cambuzat come from the European underground post-punk scene, were members of the Putan Club and have collaborated with Lydia Lunch, among others. They are also restless travellers, in search of sounds and musical forms that remain hidden from the everyday Western gaze. After traveling to the Uighur region of China and the Kurdish regions of Turkey, they began to explore the Banga ceremony in the Djerid Desert of Tunisia - a ritual of enormous intensity that does not exorcise demons, but rather invites them into a cleansing experience, transporting its participants to a state of high or trance that they similarly experience in their own music. In the course of years of travels and stays, the group Ifriqiyya Electrique began to take shape in collaboration with African musicians. Their first "performance" - after many months of learning, filming, recording and connecting - finally took place in the city of Sidi Marzug: Ifriqiyya Electrique took part in a Banga ritual themselves, the first ten minutes agonizing, the Banga adepts shocked at first, then the connection clicked: People sang, danced, went into trance, experienced healing - Ifriqiyya Electrique passed a kind of unspoken "entrance test", many more performances in the Djerid region and European countries followed.

An event by ZAM Zentrum für Aktuelle Musik e.V. in cooperation with the European Centre for Jazz and Contemporary Music Stadtgarten in the framework of "IN BETWEEN SPACES".

"Complex Collaborations #3" is supported by Fonds TURN of the German Federal Cultural Foundation.