Interview with Elisabeth Coudoux: Music is a language with other rules, it has more freedom: Video, new CD cover

Jazz interview with jazz violoncelloist Elisabeth Coudoux. An interview by email in writing. 

JazzBluesNews.com: – First let’s start with where you grew up, and what got you interested in music?

Elisabeth Coudoux: – I grew up in east of Germany, small town in GDR… My Family are musicians, Music was always around me.

JBN: – How did your sound evolve over time? What did you do to find and develop your sound?

EC: – With Jazz I started the way to my own voice on the cello. The most important practical Music for me is free improvisation in an exchange with other musicians.

JBN: – What practice routine or exercise have you developed to maintain and improve your current musical ability especially pertaining to rhythm?

EC: – Hearing and feeling the resonance with me and my instrument.

JBN: – How to prevent disparate influences from coloring what you’re doing?

EC: – I like to get influenced by the real live around me and the work of other musicians and artists.

JBN: – How do you prepare before your performances to help you maintain both spiritual and musical stamina?

EC: – I try to be myself and give the music what the music needs, listening!

JBN: – What do you love most about your new album 2020: <Elisabeth Coudoux Emiszatett – Physis>, how it was formed and what you are working on today.

EC: – My new Album shows situations, spaces, energy and ideas from actual creativity while the sound is moving.

JBN: – Ism is culled from a variety of lives dates with various performers over the course of a few years. Did your sound evolve during that time? And how did you select the musicians who play on the album?

EC: – My sound is kind of evolving with each meeting. I try to keep it flexible. The musicians I choose belongs to my band for 7 years. We know us really well and love to develop our music together.

JBN: – What’s the balance in music between intellect and soul?

EC: – While playing its maybe more intellect. High educated musicians in a high culture. But I am on the way to find the exit, to mix my feelings with creativity in order to stay with intellectual thoughts.

JBN: – There’s a two-way relationship between audience and artist; you’re okay with giving the people what they want?

EC: – I hope they not always know what they want.

JBN: – Please any memories from gigs, jams, open acts and studio sessions which you’d like to share with us?

EC: – Improvising with dancers opened my sense for the room and my body while playing. With this feeling the music has more air to breath.

JBN: – How can we get young people interested in jazz when most of the standard tunes are half a century old?

EC: – Let them be creative. Learn to use their communicational ways and don’t force them, just be there as a honest human.

JBN: – John Coltrane said that music was his spirit. How do you understand the spirit and the meaning of life?

EC: – Music is a language with other rules, that means it has more freedom. I need this freedom to be ok with myself and to be a part of this world, to communicate. The meaning of life has a lot of components, it is like a possibility to bring everything to resonance with each other.

JBN: – If you could change one thing in the musical world and it would become a reality, what would that be?

EC: – Develop a new system where creation and recreation form a balanced cycle.

JBN: – Who do you find yourself listening to these days?

EC: – My Childrens, the heater, Georges Lewis and the Splitter Orchestra, Whitney Johnson

JBN: – What is the message you choose to bring through your music?

EC: – I don’t have a sentence as a message.

JBN: – Let’s take a trip with a time machine, so where and why would you really wanna go?

EC: – In the Future.

JBN: – I have been asking you so far, now may I have a question from yourself…

EC: – What is your message that you want to convey by working for this website?

JBN: – Recognized from jazz musicians who are intellectual and who are not. develop jazz and blues music. And we organize several jazz festivals, why not, and for this…

JBN: – So putting that all together, how are you able to harness that now?

EC: – It is not easy to be open to an Imaginary audience.

Interview by Simon Sargsyan