Just for Fun - World Trombone Quartet
Having known each other for many years, we felt the desire to make music and spend more time together. Since all four of us come from different backgrounds, we were curious to see what would happen if we were to bring that together in one quartet.
Our first concert as a quartet was during the Slide Factory festival in Rotterdam in 2009. The festival’s theme being Meet the World, the organization named us the World Trombone Quartet, symbolizing our different styles and backgrounds and our roots in different parts of the (music) world. Since other festivals have continued to use that name we decided to keep it.
We all enjoyed it so much that we kept finding reasons to meet and play together. From these encounters came the idea for this CD. We had an invitation to the Arctic Trombone Festival in Tromsø, Norway, and when we were planning rehearsals we found out that all of us were free the whole week. So why not meet in Berlin, rehearse calmly and record a CD, Just for Fun?
That is what we did and here is the result!
We have tried to find a good mix of existing repertoire and new pieces and arrangements in different styles to show the wide variety of possibilities of a trombone quartet. Daniel Schnyder, a Swiss born composer and saxophone player living in New York, wrote a brand new trombone quartet for us: Chorals and Interludes. The Belgian composer and trombonist Steven Verhelst composed his First Trombone Quartet and arranged a beautiful aria by Handel for this CD. Dutch composer and jazzpianist Martin Fondse transcribed some of his own compositions for our trombone quartet and Robert Elkjer made a new arrangement for two trombones and piano of the enchanting Debussy song Clair de Lune.
We hope you will have as much fun listening to this CD as we had making it!
Joe, Jörgen, Michel and Stefan