KulturKomplott CD review

Kulturkomplott (Germany)
“An album that is incredibly inspiring.”

 

 

 

https://www.kultkomplott.de/Artikel/Musik/Archiv/ 

Mark Lotz has internalized world music. The son of jazz historian, political scientist and economist Rainer Lotz was born in Tübingen, grew up in Thailand and Uganda, studied ethnology and musicology himself and finally jazz flute in Hilversum. Prerequisites that leave him little choice but to deal intensively with improvisation and folk music from different continents.

Added to this is a strong political awareness, which, taken together, forms the basis for the album “Freshta”. Each of the eleven compositions on “Freshta” is dedicated to an advocate for justice and human dignity, such as the Mexican artist Isabel Cabanillas, who fought against the murder of women and violence in the border town of Ciudad Juárez and was shot dead in 2020 at the age of 26, or the Pakistani children’s rights activist and Nobel Peace Prize winner Malala Yousafzai. Another song (“Mahbouba”) is a tribute to the co-founder of the influential NGO “Afghan Women’s Network”, Mahbouba Seraj, who was born in Kabul.

Mark Lotz has put together a German-Dutch quintet to realize his compositional ideas, dedicating a song to each of these personalities. When selecting the instrumentalists, he was particularly interested in their ability to lend an emotional level to complex music. And the quintet succeeds in doing this in a rousing way. It grooves rapidly, skilfully touching on the realm of chamber music. There are jazz components from Africa and India, revolutionary intellectual stuff and traditional swing. Mark Lotz strongly determines the atmosphere of the music with his various flutes. Even bold chords and their changes still sound airy and lively thanks to Lotz’s rushing, very melodic solos. An album that lives from its dynamic contrasts and is incredibly inspiring.

Jörg Konrad