Projects

Minsarah

This is my trio that I’ve had together for a decade now with Florian Weber on piano and Ziv Ravitz on drums. These guys are my family…my brothers. We have been through quite a bit together over the years and have a very special musical language to prove it! I’ve learned a lot growing together with them and I feel very fortunate to have met them so early on!

“The group blurs lines between melody and pure color, between form and abstraction, and ultimately between jazz and chamber music.”
— The New York Times

Jeff Denson’s Secret World

The music of the Jeff Denson Quartet pushes through the boundaries of conventions in music. By inventively mixing the world of composed and improvised music, Jeff Denson creates a unique language of his own, where intoxicating melodies and rhythms transport the listener away to unknown lands where vivid hues of tone paints the aural canvas of the inner ear. The music is steeped in the jazz tradition, where the propulsive rhythms are the heartbeat of the music and the musicians are master improvisers of harmonic structures, song forms, and melodic invention. Where the music diverges from the jazz tradition and creates its unique fingerprint in the handling of the juxtaposition of the composed and improvised material, the roles and uses of the instruments within the compositions, its musical forms and the unmistakably memorable melodic language of Jeff Denson. The strength of the melodies transcend genre or idiomatic leanings and plants themselves in the ears of the listeners, leaving them singing them long after the music has stopped.

The Jeff Denson Quartet is:
Jeff Denson - Double Bass & Vocals, Ralph Alessi - Trumpet, Florian Weber - piano, Melodica & Glockenspiel, and Dan Weiss - Drums

Jeff Denson & Claudio Puntin Duo

I met Claudio through Florian Weber when we performed together at the Kempen Klassic Geburtstagfest (Classical Music Festival in Kempen, Germany), and again when he joined Minsarah for a performance at the Gustav Mahler Festival in Toblach, Italy. Claudio and I had an instant connection and he asked me to join his band Sepiasonic for some tours in Germany and Switzerland — great music and great times! Claudio and I and met for two separate recording sessions in two different cities in Germany — Cologne and later Berlin — to record a completely improvised double bass and clarinet duo album. I have always been very excited about this recording and I’m planning to have it released in 2012!

Lee Konitz New Quartet

It was always a dream of mine when I was a student back at Berklee College of Music that I would someday be in Lee Konitz’s band, and as luck would have it, that is exactly what happened! Lee heard my trio (Minsarah) performing and really liked what he heard, and that led him to attend three more of our concerts. After hearing us for the fourth time, Lee invited us to meet at his apartment for a session - this led to the formation of the Lee Konitz New Quartet, a band in which Lee wrote is the first actual band he’s ever had! To date, the quartet has released two albums on Enja Records: “Deep Lee” and the “Lee Konitz New Quartet: Live at the Village Vanguard”.

Solo

Solo performance is something that has always intrigued me. As a double bassist, it is most common to function in a supportive role in the majority of musical situations; solo performance is obviously an exception. As a “single-line” instrument, it is a great challenge to perform solo and to create the entire musical world in any given piece, and this is what captured me. A musician spends countless hours alone honing their art, and through that process grows attached to the sounds, textures and emotions that they reach with their instrument. The double bass is an incredibly rich instrument which has a wide tonal palate and extensive range that can span the reaches of the entire stringed instrument family, and yet its inherent subtly can be missed (or masked) by other instruments in an ensemble situation. Having spent five years in San Diego, CA working on my doctorate in contemporary music, I explored the timbral possibilities of my instrument through the performance of solo and chamber music of composers of the 20th and 21st centuries as well as the classical double bass solo literature. The study and performance of that music opened my ears to a wider spectrum of tonal colors on my instrument and thereby opened the doors of my musical concept. While living there, I had the great and unusual opportunity to have a regular solo double bass gig once a month for a year and a half and it afforded me an opportunity to explore the creation of my own solo performance language through both improvised and original notated musical performances.