Sebastian Sternal & hr-Bigband - Turning Point (2024) [Hi-Res]

Pianist and composer Sebastian Sternal (*1983) is a musical jack-of-all-trades with many creative faces. Sternal not only plays piano in this project, but also wrote all nine compositions and conducted the band during the recording. As his trademark, the music here also combines influences from classical music and jazz and impresses with dazzling tonal colours, catchy melodies and energetic grooves. The outstanding soloists of the hr-Bigband shine with contrasting improvisation and interactions.

As a pianist, Sebastian Sternal, alongside Michael Wollny and Florian Weber, is one of the greats of the younger German jazz generation and is exemplary of a new type of musician of recent decades. He possesses outstanding technical mastery and is open to other genres as a matter of course. He was influenced by jazz and classical music studies in Cologne and Paris.

His love of jazz and classical music is part of his program. With his Symphonic Society, he realizes an organic integration of elements of jazz and classical music. He combines the richness of sound of a string quartet with a jazz wind quartet.

His music is characterized by a pleasant mixture of restraint and presence. It radiates dignity and strength, never imposes itself and is so appealing that you simply cannot escape it. Sternal is a virtuoso with a commanding left hand, which often engages in contrasting dialogues with the right hand with independent melodic lines. The influences of jazz greats such as Art Tatum, Keith Jarrett and Chick Corea, as well as those of the impressionists Maurice Ravel and Claude Debussy, resonate in this wonderfully balanced sound.

As an innovator of contemporary jazz and also for his diverse projects, Sternal was awarded the ECHO Jazz prize in 2013, 2016 and 2018. He was also honoured with the "Annual German Record Critics Award" in 2015. This is rounded off by the "Neuer Deutscher Jazzpreis", the WDR Jazzpreis and the Concours Piano Jazz Martial Solal (Paris). At a young age, he received a scholarship from the German National Academic Foundation. He has worked with jazz greats such as Dee Dee Bridgewater, David Binney, John Riley and Larry Grenadier. Standing still is therefore not an option for Sebastian Sternal and, with this in mind, he has realized a fantastic project with the hr-Bigband (Frankfurt Radio Bigband) in Frankfurt, one of the best big band ensembles in Europe.