Frankfurt Radio Big Band - Kriegel Today! (2020)

“For some time now there has been a strong initiative to keep the oeuvre of guitarist, author and illustrator Volker Kriegel (1943 - 2003) alive. Six albums with bonus material from the private archive of Volker Kriegel have been published/re-released so far. Even previously unknown material - carefully restored and remastered - was thus made available to interested listeners.
In 2018 we were very pleased to find out that the Frankfurt Radio Big Band was going to celebrate Kriegel's work with two homage evenings in the "hr-Sendesaal" in Frankfurt, still in the same year: The year when Volker Kriegel would have turned 75. Ev Kriegel, the widow of Volker Kriegel, suggested a release on CD and an agreement was soon reached with the management of the band to combine the best of the two evenings on one album.
A bridge from Kriegel's original recordings to the present was successfully constructed. The previous recordings are now perfectly complemented by today's brilliant live interpretation by Jim McNeely and his much larger line-up. And so the importance of Kriegel as an essential pioneer of Jazz-Rock was demonstrated in a very impressive way - "Kriegel Today!"
But what would his music sound like today? Jim McNeely, head of the Frankfurt Radio Big Band, was creating highly inspiring big band arrangements for two concerts in Frankfurt and demonstrated that Kriegel's music, composed a good forty years ago, is still captivating today and definitely worth arranging for a large jazz orchestra. To live up to this, Jim McNeely divided the highly original art of the composer-guitarist between three guitarists, in order to make the broad spectrum of this sound world audible in an appropriate way, and also to avoid any direct comparison with only one soloist: these are the hr-Bigband guitarist Martin Scales, John Schröder from Frankfurt, drummer and guitarist in various international formations, and finally the Dutch Thelonious Monk Prize winner Jesse van Ruller.”