The Pavilions of Honour

Pierre Favre is one of the musicians who helped put European jazz on a new track, emancipating the percussion from its conventional rhythm role and allowing it to become an all-round vehicle of rhythm and melody. His set of instruments forms a unique and independent sound-world from which he lures orchestral dimensions in his solo performances.

Marcel Bernasconi (born 1940) started in 1965 as pianist in his own trio and quartet at the late jazzclub “Africana” in Zurich. Then he toured with his bands around Switzerland and  Europe. In 1968 he was one of the founders of the Bacillus Club in Zurich. In the next few years he worked in different formations, but increasingly also cultivated solo playing.

Enlarged image of the front page of the New York Times from 23 October, 2005. Text overlayed in semi-transparent white reads from top to bottom: “Jazz Willisau, Sa 28 Jan 06, 20.30 Foroom, Marty Ehrlich Quartet, N.Y.” Marty Ehrlich (born May 31, 1955) is a multi-instrumentalist (saxophones, clarinets, flutes) who currently lives in New York City and is considered one of the leading figures in avant-garde jazz.

Black poster with many thin, parallel, vertically-oriented and irregularly spaced orange stripes covering entire area. Text created by closely-spaced orange stripes reads: Der Rote Bereich (The Red Range), 2008. Founded as a quintet in Nuremberg in 1992, ‘Der Rote Bereich’ play a very lively and principally open mix of free improvisation.

“Uwe demonstrates the full range of his fretboard methods, from bending complex chords and harmonics to accurate percussion and echo effects to the electrifying scalar flights that jolt his improvisations onto another plane of guitar virtuosity. Uwe Kropinski may some day be known as the Jimi Hendrix of the acoustic guitar.”

(Guitar Player Magazine)

White poster covered in graphite marks. Words in the negative space created by the graphite: Charles Gayle Solo, 2009. Charles Gayle (born February 28, 1939) is an American free jazz musician. Initially known as a saxophonist who came to prominence in the 1990s after decades of obscurity.

Daniel Humair, the Swiss-born drummer, moved to Paris back in 1958 where his performances with US jazz greats became an indispensable bench for American jazz in Europe. Even more important is the key role that Daniel Humair took on in the emancipation of European jazz.

The sounds of ‘This Is Pan’ deserve its own name - Elastic Jazz. The four musicians skilfully play with the elasticity. And that without a harmony instrument. The quartet changes the shape of its pieces continuously, the instruments emerge individually, look for their own way and finally approach again, returning to their original form.