Chat Bizarre

Cologne’s Stecken club was legendary. For the city’s younger jazz scene, it offered a laboratory for unusual experiments with various components of current music; sometimes this resulted in aesthetic hybrids, and sometimes the mix bubbled over in its cauldron, exploding with a bang. For MENGAMO, the trio founded in 2012 by Philipp Brämswig, Sebastian Scobel and Thomas Sauerborn, the evenings at Stecken were of central importance. Before a live audience, the three musicians from Cologne were able to fuse elements ranging far beyond the usual in this combination of instruments, which is traditional both in jazz and in rock music: here were brutally loud prog-rock alongside grooving soul jazz and hard bop, here were nonchalant singer/songwriter themes, European-style modern jazz and sound clusters of undefinable tonalities. In the meantime, these highly divergent components have become part of MENGAMO’s aesthetic repertoire, no matter whether they are developed in a linear style or stacked horizontally, upon one another – they remain untamed, rough and wild.