OR by SPEEQ : Sidsel Endresen-Hasse Poulsen-Luc Ex-Mark Sanders
SPEEQ is a quartet of European improvisers, which came together for the first time in March 2006 at the Banlieues Bleues festival North of Paris. Other concerts followed on different jazz festivals like: Luz Saint Sauveur, 'Jazz d'Or' in Strasbourg 'Cheltenham Jazz festival' and 'Europa Jazz' in LeMans. Other festivals will follow later this year (Pori, Nantes, Bordeaux). The concert in Stasbourg was very well recorded. This was lucky because not always a good concert also means a good recording (or the other way around) but this time everything fell on it's place: 58 minutes of intense, sharp and free improvised music. Sometimes the pieces sound more like songs than the more usual abstract improvising. The beauty also lies in the different backgrounds of the musicians. Sidsel Endresen, with her very beautifull voice and her special 'sidsel-language', comes from world of contempory music and music around the 'ECM'-label. Mark plays with a wide range of jazz musicians (Evan Parker, Steve Beresford, Bill Laswell) but also with more 'rock' groups like Jah Wobble. Hasse plays in the group of Louis Sclavis and his acoustic guitar can easely combine almost classical jazz with pure noise. Luc Ex acoustic bass brings along his 'punk background' of The Ex and later 4Walls.
