12 Paradoxes by Thomas Heberer/Steve Swell

Steve Swell

I’ve been a huge fan of trombonist Steve Swell ever since first hearing him live in Cologne, in my native Germany, in the early 1990s as a member of
Joey Baron’s band.

By the late 2000s, I had relocated to New York City. While I already knew a lot of musicians from earlier visits, it took time to make new friends and be seen as a local – I had to prove that I was not just a visitor. I will forever be grateful to Karl Berger, another “Kraut in the Big Apple” and an old friend, who invited me to join his newly formed Improvisers Orchestra early on.

Right off the bat, the group had a residency at John Zorn’s club, “The Stone,” on Avenue C in Manhattan, where we started rehearsing and performing every Monday for a year before moving on to other venues. That’s where I first met and played with Steve, and we’ve never looked back, until the beginning of the pandemic when everybody in the city just hunkered down.

This spring we reconnected as members of a large ensemble under the direction of bassist and composer Pascal Niggenkemper. Following that event, Steve and I decided to play duo again, something we had not done in years. After a Swell/Heberer concert at Downtown Music Gallery in the Chinatown in July, we agreed to do this recording later in the summer.

We sincerely hope you’ll enjoy the results, 12 improvised pieces, a back and forth between tracks that focus on extended techniques and those
that emphasize pitch-related materials.

Thomas Heberer, New York City, October 16, 2023


Thomas Heberer

Thomas Heberer is a longstanding member of the Instant Composers Pool (ICP). He’s a solid interpreter of some very complicated compositions from a group that is well known for its fast paced stopping and starting of different genres, rapid tempo changes, different textures and of course their very Dutch sense of humor. And all of those elements are utilized during just one piece and those elements get included in just about every other piece they perform during the course of one of their sets. And they’re all pretty well known as a wild bunch, in a good way of course. Thomas is such a great person besides being a great musician, I’ve come to believe he’s been a real grounding force for that group.

When Thomas started living in New York I really didn’t know him that well. I think we might have met once or twice but I couldn’t tell you where or when. When Karl Berger started his residency at the Stone to raise money for his Creative Music Studio I signed on and found Thomas there as well. I immediately took to this fellow brass man, sitting together, making up backgrounds and trading solos each of those evenings. There were some nights that Thomas soloed so beautifully it reminded me of how you can be inspired not just by your heroes but by those musicians you share the bandstand with on any given night.

We had made several attempts to play duo, mostly with compositions but our busy schedules really didn’t allow for us to build a strong vocabulary. Then this past summer we decided to get together on a regular basis to play and record at Thomas’s Upper West Side apartment. We decided at that time that the best approach would be to improvise rather than play compositions. I think that it was the right approach. And we recorded everything we did. Thomas had the dual job of playing and recording and then mixing everything for this Bandcamp release. And, he came up with the idea for naming the pieces after different paradoxes which he had researched. I have to give him a lot of credit for keeping it/me going and making this happen. It was fun playing and just hanging and talking with him after being so separate from all of our musician friends for so long during Covid. The music here shows the many facets of improvising for trumpet and trombone. We hope it is a worthy representation of our efforts.

Steve Swell, October 19, 2023, 32,000 feet above the Atlantic Ocean

Born in Newark, NJ, Trombonist/Composer Steve Swell has been an active member of the NYC music community since 1975. He has toured and recorded with diverse jazz personalities from Lionel Hampton and Buddy Rich to "outsiders" Anthony Braxton and Cecil Taylor. Steve has received numerous awards and grants.

steveswell.com