Continuum Nils Wülker

• 1Continuum05:29
• 2Brand New Ending05:00
• 3Unhidden Intentions05:15
• 4Munich Afternoon04:58
• 5Distorting Time and Space04:31
• 6Nika's Dream04:29
• 7Hybrid Balance05:57
• 8Retrace Your Steps05:00
• 9Landscape05:18
• 10The Dark Frame04:41
• Total Runtime50:38

Info for Continuum

Nils Wülker has advanced to become one of the most successful jazz trumpeters and composers in Europe over the past twenty years. In September 2021, Nils Wülker will produce his orchestral album CONTINUUM with new compositions of his own with the BR Munich Radio Orchestra, which will be released on Warner Musik in April 2022, as the twelfth album under his own name.

The upward curve that the internationally renowned musician from Germany has described with his last three studio albums now crowns his masterpiece to date, "Continuum." Recorded in the fall of 2021 with Wülker's superb rhythm section and the award-winning BR Munich Radio Orchestra, this orchestral, wide-screen yet intricate album will be released in the spring of 2022, fittingly on Wülker's 20th anniversary on stage. Unpredictable and beyond all genre boundaries, "Continuum" presents fascinating, overwhelming new music: a force of nature composed down to the last detail with lively improvisational peaks - an acoustic panorama whose every musical moment radiates with energy, happiness and confidence.

"We've come full circle," says Nils Wülker when describing the evolution of his now twelfth album - from maximum individual work, after all he recorded and produced large parts of the previous album under pandemic conditions in his own home studio and remotely, to sixty musicians making acoustic music together in one room. The ten pieces are written directly for the orchestra, which here not only accompanies but interacts, even leads.

"My way of writing runs through all the music," recognizes Nils Wülker. In two cases with amplification: "Munich Afternoon" and "Landscape" were written together with Massive Attack and Hollywood maestro Craig Armstrong, with whom Wülker has collaborated many times in the past. Also featured are four brand new Wülker compositions and four thoroughly renewed and expanded tracks from his latest album GO, arranged by Swedish conductor Hans Ek, whom Nils Wülker met during performances with the E.S.T. Symphony and who had already arranged the trumpeter's own songs for a performance with the Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra in February 2021.

"Wülker's beautiful trumpet playing flies freely over the orchestral soundscapes here," recognized Ek, who is also conductor of the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic Orchestra. "These are compositions of melodic richness and intuitive but crystal-clear imagination."

The large-scale orchestra and the band are fully interwoven on "Continuum," playing with each other as equals, forming the basis for the soloist's brilliant trumpet playing - superbly conducted by Patrick Hahn, the only 26-year-old principal guest conductor of the Munich Radio Orchestra. "Ultimately, the electronically influenced aesthetic of GO and its orchestral realization, first in October 2020 with the NDR Radiophilharmonie and just a few months later with the Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra under Hans Ek, also influenced me for this new orchestral album," Nils Wülker tells us. "Although these ten pieces are completely acoustic, they still have the electronically influenced DNA of GO. Hans Ek has, in my opinion, found a fantastic way to arrange very modern and to transfer the electronically influenced rhythm, the groove of my music and its atmospheric density, to the orchestra." That dynamic is what makes this album work - quiet string parts and loud orchestral tutti draw listeners in. "I call this album "Continuum" because it stakes out a terrain for me and also marks the genesis," says Nils Wülker. There's no doubt about it: Nils Wülker's history of musical development, now spanning two decades, inevitably influences his new album, now his twelfth - electronically inspired, yet completely analog and even orchestral. Continuum wonderfully.

Nils Wülker, trumpet, flugelhorn
Jan Miserre, piano, Fender Rhodes
Sven Faller, double bass
Matthias Meusel, drums, shaker
Münchner Rundfunkorchester
Patrick Hahn, conductor

Nils Wülker
Over the past twenty years, Nils Wülker has become one of the most successful jazz trumpet players and composers in Europe. Born in Bonn in 1977, he began piano lessons at the age of seven and switched to the trumpet at the age of ten; classical, not yet a trace of jazz. During an exchange year in the USA, he finally discovers jazz at the age of sixteen and finds his way to Miles Davis via US3's "Cantaloop" and its original composer Herbie Hancock. Back in Germany, he was discovered in 1996 for the JugendJazzOrchester NRW, in which he played until his jazz studies at the Hochschule für Musik "Hanns Eisler" Berlin. Already active during his studies in Peter Herbolzheimer's BuJazzO, the RIAS Bigband or Thärichen's Tentett, Nils Wülker released his debut album "High Spirits", which was highly praised by critics and audiences alike, with Gene Calderazzo and Orlando LeFleming, among others, before he graduated in 2002 - as the first German jazz musician on SONY Music. The following year, the then 26-year-old composes, plays and produces his own new music for Bavarian Television's Space Night, which is released on the album "Space Night Vol. 10 Jazz" (with Wolfgang Muthspiel and Jochen Rückert, among others).

Between 2005 and 2012, Nils Wülker releases five albums of his own on his own label EAR Treat Music, with guests such as Torun Eriksen, Silje Nergaard and Dominic Miller, among others, cementing his reputation as a "great lyricist" (FAZ), "exceptional composer" (Crescendo), "German jazz wonder" (Spiegel) and "great melodist" (Die Zeit). Around he tours with his own band, as well as guesting with Ute Lemper, the Cuban singer Omara Portuondo, the quartet of Sting's companion Dominic Miller, or does a European tour with Lee Ritenour, Dave and Don Grusin, Will Kennedy and Wolfgang Schmid as "Hang All Stars". Nils Wülker also leads the top-class "Jazz Baltica Ensemble" (2011) with new arrangements of his own compositions, makes remixes for Hugh Masekela, Gregory Porter or Laura Lopez Castro and produces albums for singer Cécile Verny or harmonica player Tollak and a track for Samy Deluxe.

In 2013, he was awarded the ECHO Jazz as "Instrumentalist of the Year" in the brass category, and in 2014 Nils Wülker received the German Jazz Award in Gold from BVMI for his album "Safely Falling". His eighth album "UP" will be released in February 2015 by Warner Music. For the album, Nils Wülker works with Jill Scott and Mocky in L.A., Craig Armstrong in Glasgow, Peter Vettese in London and Max Mutzke, among others. With "UP" Nils Wülker wins the Hamburg music award HANS as "Musician of the Year", is again awarded the German Jazz Award in Gold and nominated for the ECHO Jazz.

His album "ON", inspired by Hip Hop and produced in collaboration with The Krauts (producers Marteria, Peter Fox) and Ralf Mayer, is released in 2017 and is awarded the German Jazz Award in Gold in 2018. Also in 2018, Nils Wülker releases "Decade Live" as his tenth album, his first "perfectly realized" (Süddeutsche Zeitung) live album. In 2019 follows the fourth German Jazz Award in Gold for his 2012 album "Just Here, Just Now" and an extensive tour in duo with his longtime guitarist Arne Jansen under the title "Closer".

2020 sees the release of Nils Wülker's eleventh electronically inspired album GO, which the Süddeutsche Zeitung calls "groundbreaking" and "an album full of light". Radio France and BBC, among others, dedicated programs to GO, and JazzFM UK also plays the music in rotation for seven weeks. In October 2020, Nils Wülker will perform a program of his own compositions arranged for orchestra with the NDR Radiophilharmonie, which he will continue in 2021 with the Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra in Stockholm.

In September 2021, Nils Wülker will produce his orchestral album CONTINUUM with new original compositions with the BR Münchner Rundfunkorchester, scheduled for release in April 2022 on Warner Musik, then his twelfth album under his own name.

In addition to extensive tours at home and abroad with his own band, Nils Wülker has played in recent years as a guest soloist with Gregory Porter, E.S.T. Symphony, Max Mutzke and Klaus Doldinger, was responsible for the musical design of the Grimme Preis in 2016 and recorded solo features for Marteria, among others. He also has his own radio show "Offbeat" on 917XFM from 2017 to 2020 and has curated the jazz concert program at Agathenburg Castle as artistic director since 2012.

This album contains no booklet.