Sylvain Debaisieux (B) – Tenor Saxophone
Bram De Looze (B) – Piano
Samuel Ber (B) – Drums
Nick Dunston (US) – Double Bass
Weston Olencki (US) – Electronics, Trombone
Lester St-Louis (US) – Cello
After a first project called “Between”, featuring saxophone players Bo Van Der Werf and Guillaume Orti, Pentadox now becomes an electro-acoustic sextet entitled “Fragments of Expansion”: by adding Lester St Louis on cello, Nick Dunston on double bass and Weston Olencki on trombone and electronics, the band uses this highly specific instrumentation to embark in an original direction with three new adventurous minds, who are all composers, improvisers and performers. This new project received the Jong JazzTalent award from Gent Jazz Festival.
The possibilities for expanding a band’s sound are multiple, and Pentadox has opted for an inner approach by inviting musicians with whom they have already worked in the past (as it is the case for Dunston and Ber, or St-Louis and De Looze) but they have also chosen to include electronics as a tool which encourages deep interaction and opens up their sonic identity to a larger field of possibilities (by inviting Olencki). With “Fragments of Expansion”, the ensemble transforms into a creative and improvised music sextet focusing on long-term experience, from its start as a residency, to a recording and a premiere concert at Gent Jazz Festival 2019 to a subsequent release tour (JazzLab 2020).
How to reach this point, where the interaction is deep enough to generate form, texture, melody, rhythm and harmony in a kind of synchronicity? How to switch the connections and roles between Content and Container ?
During a residency in June 2019 in La Conserve (Leuven), the band will be working on opening the seemingly dualistic relationship between Composition and Improvisation to hybrid shapes, new meanings and original ways of interacting. The sonic result is predicted as unexpected, blending individual and group perceptions and subconscious into a sustained stream of multiple fragments. A bit like mirror bursts.