Volker Kriegel - Biton Grooves (2019)

Biton thus produced a total of five albums in which Volker Kriegel was involved - but which were forgotten for a long time and did not even appear in many early discographies. However, collectors in the completion mania then paid ever higher amounts for these LPs, and also some DJs had discovered the Biton sound and obtained Beats & Breaks for their own productions from it. With this release of the VOLKER KRIEGEL BITON GROOVES there are now 37 tracks in best quality, crackle-free and affordable, which Kriegel and his fellow musicians recorded in the sessions for the legendary LPs BIT 2001, 2002, 2004, 2006 and 2008. And read the names of the participants (see the detailed discographic information in this booklet or on www.volker-kriegel.de), then it quickly becomes clear that this was the first league of German jazz and jazz rock at the start - and all more or less line-ups, which one also knows from regular Kriegel albums of the respective phase: Rainer Brüninghaus and later Thomas Bettermann (e-piano), Peter Giger, Klaus Weiss, Joe Nay & Evert Fraterman (drums/percussion), Eberhard Weber and Hans Peter Ströer (bass) and others.Yes, and what do you hear here now? Great instrumentalists, no question about it - and music that would at least partly have fitted on one or the other Kriegel album of those years. OK, here and there the melodies and sounds are a bit simpler and more catchy, but Kriegel's trademarks - his wonderful chords and double stops, the wah-wah and sitar interjections, his still impressive guitar licks in downward movement - all this can be experienced 1:1 here. And of course the partly bizarre distortion sounds of those years, which for many later born electric guitarists for a long time just sounded unbelievable to impossible. And long ago back again...