Live: JIMI TENOR & BAND

In the organizer's words:

"The Finnish musician Jimi Tenor manages a special balancing act: although he regularly combines and mixes up a wide variety of genres, influences and moods and you never know exactly what you're going to hear next, his music always sounds like Jimi Tenor."
- Deutschland Funk

This extremely prolific artist may spend his time roaming the nearby woods, picking mushrooms or retreating to his home studio in a creative mood, but his latest albums Order of Nothingness and Aulos, released on Max Weissenfeldt's Philophon Records, sound nothing like loneliness. On the contrary, it is bursting with joie de vivre, energy and liveliness. On Order of Nothingness, Tenor moves in a referential framework between the hymns of the hobo hippie Eden Ahbez and the jazz visions of Yusef Lateef, carried by the energy of Ghanaian highlife rhythms, which are, however, coated with a good pinch of "herbaceous" cosmic jazz - the result is called Kraut-Life for short: the cheerfulness of highlife meets the romantic melancholy of the Finn - cabbage is also an integral part of Finnish, not just German, cuisine. "I definitely didn't have any theme in mind", says Tenor about the lively and varied tone of the album, "I just wanted to do an album that has some groovy beats." And like all the songs that Jimi Tenor writes, these are combined with lyrics about love and hedonism, wrapped up in many metaphors.

Aulos is an organic work that was recorded mainly with acoustic instruments. The Berlin Philophon studio where the album was recorded is full of unusual instruments: Vintage keyboards, exotic string instruments, African percussion, even an entire gamelan orchestra could have been used. For Jimi, it is a place of inspiration every time he enters the hallowed halls of the studio in Kreuzberg, as exotic sound generators have always been his passion.

Tenor also describes his own brand of music as "mind travel music", a practice that seeks to reach far-flung planets through the means of imagination and sound. "What's the point to send our fragile bodies there? There's no oxygen and there's dangerous radiation. Might as well send machines there."

At concerts, Jimi Tenor transfers his approach to mind travel music to the audience, especially when he improvises: "I love to try stuff on stage that has never been tried. In my regular day-to-day life I'm not a wild person, but onstage I come alive. I almost always perform with my eyes shut, if I look at the crowd ... I lose the plot."