Bill Laurance & Michael League

In the organizer's words:

Opening concert 16th Kassel JazzFrühling

Keeping Company

"Driving a joint project forward is also a reassurance of ourselves. We are very close friends and this album is a celebration of that." - Bill Laurance

The joint duo of Bill Laurance and Michael League and their album "Keeping Company" are something of an alternative to the Snarky Puppy format. Instead of energy and extraversion, the focus here is on a shared inner perspective. You can tell by the choice of instruments. Bill Laurance leaves the keyboards in the case and concentrates entirely on the piano, acoustic in sound and at best a little mechanically prepared. Michael League chooses a fretless bass guitar and the oud, an extreme contrast to the pure groove full of legato and rubato op- tions with a transparently sparse but atmospherically rich sound. And they do without the band. This creates a special freedom for both participants. "The oud in itself has a very specific associative space," says Bill Laurance from the orchestral perspective of the piano. "When I compose, I always want to take the audience into other spaces. That works with the sound of the oud. It's not a guitar, it has something exotic about it. It's a canvas on which you can paint a lot of things.
Even on the first album, we discussed a lot whether Michael should play a fretless nylon string guitar. He tried it out, but it didn't produce the same melodies as the oud. In any case, the sound and playing without frets makes other musical information possible. That fascinated us."

"Keeping Company" is a snapshot of an unusual team, a program like a collection of clinical Polaroids. Bill Laurance and Michael League are still in the wonderfully inspiring phase of joint explorations. Everything is open. The music sounds spontaneous and intuitive. It has the power of the personal and builds on a friendship that can also tolerate humor in the motivic yarning. Perhaps one day other players will join in. So far, however, dialog in a musically intimate setting is the ideal form of artistic conversation for Bill Laurance and Michael League.

Bill Laurance piano
Michael League oud, fretless bass, vocals