Five Noire

Heidi Bayer and Sebastian Scobel first met in the Subway Jazz Orchestra, a big band consisting of young Cologne-based jazz musicians founded in 2013. That the trumpeter, a native of Kulmbach, and the pianist from Dresden would start their own duo, however, was a bit of a coincidence: in 2018 they both competed for the Folkwang Jazz Prize, winning over the jury of this competition at the jazz department of the Folkwang University. Ever since, the two have rehearsed intensely, on the one hand to deepen their roots in classical modern jazz, but on the other also to develop a vocabulary that reflects their own dialect. In Five Noir they have found their own idiom, and despite the limitations of a compositional framework, this has led them directly to the freedom of shared communication. Thus, the improvised music of the two musicians living in Cologne has aesthetic profundity and eloquent lightness, is subtly chiselled in details and transforms original compositions into a compact suite, thanks to their well-developed instinct for dynamic processes.