Griener Roder : Be Our Guest
I’ve been playing with Jan Roder for over 30 years, and if I look over at the bassist at one of my concerts, there’s a good chance it’s Jan. Bill Meyer has now interviewed Jan and me about our beginnings in Berlin in the nineties, which has just been published in the new issue of We Jazz.
In it, we talk about what drew us to Berlin back then, about the many long-forgotten clubs in Berlin, about the cheap apartments with outside toilets, about how the entire jazz scene (and not just the jazz scene) used to meet at the StadtBad on Oderberger Straße to shower because nobody had a bathroom in their apartment, and about how, because there were no telephones, you had to have a notepad and a pen at the door so that your colleagues could let you know when a gig was coming up.
You know, the usual Berlin glorification, when the East was still wild and the land was free.
“Coincidentally”, Trouble In The East Records has just released a double CD documenting the last thirty years of Jan and I making music together. Not only recordings with Rudi Mahall and Axel Dörner from the time before Die Enttäuschung, but also almost forty other musicians like Ken Vandermark, Uli Gumpert, Aki Takase, Silke Eberhard, Taiko Saito, Christof Knoche, Brandon Seabrook, Paul Brody and many more.
The double CD is out now and can be ordered from the label.
Jan and I will also have it with us at our concert with Monk’s Casino on August 17 at Jazzwerkstatt Peitz and present it to the audience (and yes, one track from Monk’s Casino is also on the record).
You can get our record at https://troubleintheeastrecords.bandcamp.com/album/be-our-guest
There is also a dedicated website where you can find all the information, including details of our previously released recordings that are commercially available.