A musician without borders

I will not apologize for the fact that the following lines may sound like the outpourings of a crazy fan. There is no other way to approach the solo album that Fredy Studer has given us to mark his 70th birthday. Studer is a wonderful and generous storyteller. You could listen to him for hours, even when he tells his stories in ordinary words at the pub table. His true language is a different one; the organ he uses to convey it is the drums. The Lucerne native is now 71 years old. He has spent almost as many years beating out rhythms. The number of audio and video recordings in which he has played a leading role, or at least made an important contribution, has reached three figures. But something was still missing.

Although the practicing karate fan has given solo concerts, he has never released a solo record. He has now finally made up for this sin of omission. And how! 14 pieces belong to the Now's the Time-cycle. They are available as digital downloads or on double vinyl LP, packaged in a fine box, together with a book with essays, interviews, photos and discography.

First the music: fourteen stories told with drums, cymbals, gongs, bowed metal, percussion and water gong. No overdubs or electronic effects were used, and the well-traveled Swiss producer Roli Mosimann is responsible for the outstanding recordings. It is only possible to begin to do justice to the brilliance of this music using ordinary language. The melodic facets and the rhythmic arcs of tension that Studer teases out of his instruments by virtue of his stupendous technique, but above all as an expression of a vision without boundaries, are breathtaking. Solo percussion can slip into top-heaviness or virtuosity. Studer avoids these dangers by never neglecting the physicality of rhythm. Even when he rolls out polyrhythms that border on the physically impossible, the sound and structures remain transparent. It goes without saying that this music refuses to fit into any stylistic pigeonholes, buzzes butterfly-like between improvisation and composition, flirts with industrial rock and abstracted P-funk, would by no means be out of place in the neighborhood of new music and could serve as a textbook for any jazz drummer. No wonder musicians as diverse as Jim Keltner, Paul Lovens, Jack DeJohnette and Vinnie Colaiuta have written rapturous tributes for the inside cover.

And the book: the essays are all worth reading, but the most enjoyable part is a long interview with the artist conducted during several boat trips on Lake Lucerne. Here it really becomes clear how broad the horizon and thirst for knowledge of this passionate musician is. It starts with drummers from Basel and Jimi Hendrix, leads past countless fellow musicians from all over the world (Charlie Mariano, John Zorn, Sonny Sharrock, Jamaaladeen Tacuma, Pierre Fravre, Irène Schweizer, Rosko Gee, Phil Minton, Robyn Schulkowsky, Christy Doran and many more) and ends up with style-defining bands of his own such as OM, Koch-Schütz-Studer and Phall Fatale.

The album and book together form a great piece of Swiss music history.