JO und Party

Born in Essen in 1991, Jo Beyer studied percussion at the jazz department of the Institute of Music of the Osnabrück University with Christoph Hillmann, to whom he was first introduced as a teenager by his father, the guitarist Andreas Wahl. In Osnabrück, the young percussionist co-founded Trio Malstrom together with the guitarist Axel Zajac and the tenor saxophone player Salim Javaid – but without a bass player. Beyer, who now lives in Cologne, immediately knew how their music needed to sound without a bass – performed by a collective of three improvising musicians meeting at eye level.
His Quartett JO also lacks a bass – which opens up areas of freedom for the group’s jazz rock-inspired improvised music: acoustically, with Roman Babik diving down to the lowest ranges of the piano, Wahl adding an octave effect to his guitar or Sven Decker making his tenor saxophone grumble in the bass register. But also metrically, with Beyer, for example, nonchalantly ignoring the limitations of the bar line, creating tension in the rhythmic foundation.