Louisiana Ritual Mikkelborg Riessler Siegel Trio

• 1 Winter Sun/Sig nærmer tiden 08:06
• 2 Mirages 06:22
• 3 Gothic 09:22
• 4 Live in the Park 2019 (Live) 19:53
• 5 Song Tread Lightly 04:26
• Total Runtime 48:09

Info for Louisiana Ritual

Louisiana Ritual is a celebration of the long and fruitful artistic collaboration between three artists with backgrounds in both jazz, contemporary and folk music, that has unfolded at the internationally renowned Louisiana Museum of Moden Art. With a unique mix of collaborative composition and improvisation, the trio has created an album ranging from airy contemplation to high energy experiments.

For a period of ten years, the Mikkelborg Riessler Siegel Trio gathered for an annual summer ritual under open skies in the iconic Sculpture Park at the prestigious Louisiana Museum of Modern Art north of Copenhagen. Here, a shared musical voice emerged, of electronic textures, new chamber music, and free improvisation, in a genre without a name, shaped by its surroundings and by time.

In 2013, I was invited to perform in the museum park', says composer and musician Wayne Siegel. "On the same occasion, Palle Mikkelborg and Michael Riessler performed as a duo, and we were all accommodated in the museum’s boathouse, eating, drinking and hanging out. I don’t know if it was a secret intention to bring us together, but there was immediate chemistry’. Since then, these three distinctive musicians, each with their own career and musical style, have formed an unconventional constellation and developed a shared voice.

Louisiana Ritual brings together five works where the rhythms of nature, human fragility, and the presence of art merge into evocative sonic tableaux. Listen for example to Winter Sun, citing Oluf Ring's melancholic melody 'Sig nærmer tiden' (1922), or the Mikkelborg composition Song Tread Lightly, which has earlier been used for the memorial concert at Roskilde Festival in 2001, a year after the tragic festival accident in which nine young people lost their lives during a Pearl Jam concert.

Palle Mikkelborg, trumpet
Michael Riessler, bass clarinet
Wayne Siegel, motion-tracking system

Palle Mikkelborg
is one of Denmark’s most influental and original jazz musicians. As a child, he received lessons in playing trumpet, but apart from that he is self-taught. He has been inspired by jazz musicians such as Miles Davis, George Russell and Gil Evans but also by composers such as Ravel, Messiaen and Charles Ives.

Since the 1960s he has challenged the musical conventions with his personal trumpet playing, ambitious orchestrations and compositional crossover projects. Mikkelborg has his own both lyrical and dramatic style. A lot of his music has a very spacious character, which is also reflected in his use of unusual orchestrations and electronics. Furthermore, his compositions have a spiritual quality to them, as can be heard in Going to pieces without falling apart (2002) or My God and my All (1991).

Mikkelborg’s name is known far beyond Scandinavia, and his international co-operations include the famous Aura, written for and recorded with Miles Davis.

Michael Riessler
Bass clarinetist Michael Riessler, born in Ulm in 1957, is a cross-border artist who straddles the boundaries between improvisation and contemporary classical music, between language and sound, music and dance. Riessler has worked with musicians from a wide range of backgrounds: from Maurizio Kagel to John Cage, from Steve Reich to Helmut Lachenmann, from the Arditti Quartet to Ensemble Modern, from David Byrne to Michel Portal, from Carla Bley to Terry Bozzio... Since the 1990s, he has also written and performed music for radio plays and films, including for Edgar Reitz's award-winning four-hour epic "Die andere Heimat" (The Other Homeland), and, on behalf of ZDF/ARTE, he scored the silent film "Hamlet" (1921, starring Asta Nielsen) for the Berlin Film Festival. Since 2001, he has also collaborated with the celebrated Karajan clarinetist Sabine Meyer, one of the world's leading Mozart interpreters. For his most recent project, "BIG CIRCLE," Riessler, who holds a professorship at the Munich University of Music, was awarded the German Record Critics' Annual Prize and the Munich AZ magazine's Culture Star in 2012.

Since their days together at the Orchestre National de Jazz in the early 1990s, Riessler has worked regularly with French accordionist Jean-Louis Matinier. Matinier is considered the most adventurous and unblinkered virtuoso of his class on this instrument. Matinier studied classical music, then turned to improvisational music, and today effortlessly transcends the boundaries between ethnic traditions, swinging grooves, and bold neo-classical innovation. As an irreplaceable collaborator, Matinier can be heard on records by (among others) Louis Sclavis, Gianluigi Trovesi, Michel Godard, and, most prominently, bassist Renaud Garcia-Fons. Matinier is also a regular accompanist of France’s chanson legend Juliette Greco.

Wayne Siegel
was born in Los Angeles in 1953. Most important in the way of early musical influence was the American folk music tradition (Pete Seeger, Woody Guthrie, etc.). Major influences during the 1960’s include the Afro-American blues tradition and avant-garde rock (The Mothers of Invention, Captain Beefheart). From 1971 to 1974 he studied composition and philosophy at the University of California at Santa Barbara (UCSB), where he concerned himself mainly with the European avant-garde tradition. After three years at UCSB he decided to complete his Bachelor of Arts degree while studying with Per Nørgård in Aarhus, Denmark. He remained in Aarhus and in 1977 he received his Danish degree in composition from the Royal Academy of Music in Aarhus. In 1978 he was awarded a three-year grant in composition from the Danish Art Council, working as a free-lance composer in the years that followed. After two years as administrative director of the West Jutland Symphony Orchestra and affiliated chamber ensemble, Esbjerg Ensemble, he was in 1986 appointed director of the newly founded national electronic music center, DIEM (The Danish Institute of Electroacoustic Music) in Aarhus. In 1994 he chaired the 19th International Computer Music Conference (ICMC) in Aarhus. From 1996 to 1998 he served as chairman of the two music committees of the Danish State Arts Foundation. In 2003 DIEM became part of The Royal Academy of Music in Aarhus, and Siegel was appointed professor of electronic music. In 2013 he was awarded a life-long artist’s stipend from the Danish Ministry of Culture for outstanding artistic achievement.

Booklet for Louisiana Ritual