Christoph Pepe Auer - The New York Sessions (2019)

“The New York Sessions” is the first part of a CD compilation named Sessionwork. Sessionwork is a concept, developed in my stay in New York. The first step was to play my compositions with a numerous of great musicians to gather ideas of how my music could sound. The result was that I arranged my compositions almost daily for 2 months to suite various instruments and musicians. After a while I decided to record with Art, Nicolas and Ziv and started to rehearse with them intensively. Thanks to the work with these incredible musicians, it was possible to create a band sound. Everyone brought their full creativity into the compositions and through sessions with other people during that time I often got new ideas for the rehearsals. As a result from all the sessions I played, concerts I heard, workshops I joined and lessons I took during my stay, the band sound contains an influence from about a hundred different musicians from the New Yorker jazz scene.

Christoph Pepe Auer is a vienna-based saxophone player. He studied at the first jazz-school in Europe, in Graz, where he got several scholarships. He played with musicians named Adam Holzman (keyboarder of Miles Davis), Joseph Bowie, Concert Jazz Orchestra Vienna. He was sent to the IASJ Meeting directed by David Liebman as a representative of the university of Graz. This meeting inspired him to start to compose intensively. 2005 he got the Hans-Koller-Price, which gave him the possibility to stay in New York, where he took lessons from Tony Malaby, Donny McCaslin, Marcus Strickland and Branford Marsalis.