Live recording from January 20th 2017 at Theaterhaus Stuttgart when Herbert Joos was awarded the 2017 Baden-Württemberg Jazz Prize for Lifetime Achievement. Joos assembled for the award ceremony concert an all-star cast of improvisation culture. Herbert Joos has called his orchestra suite, which he premiered on this occasion, “Change of Beauty”.

Herbert Joos has called his orchestra suite, which he premiered on the occasion of being awarded the 2017 Baden-Württemberg Jazz Prize for Lifetime Achievement, “Change of Beauty”. Beauty is a question of view and beauty can endure only in a state of flux –an insight that coincides with Herbert Joos’s experience in the course of a dazzling career as a musician.

The trumpeter, flugelhorn player and composer appeared on the jazz scene at a time when certainties were crumbling. Born in 1940, and influenced by musical individualists like Miles Davis, Chet Baker and Billie Holiday, Joos first learned the craft of imitation in ensembles such as the Modern Jazz Quintet Karlsruhe, but at the same time experienced the beginnings of the aesthetic resistance.

He found like-minded colleagues such as Hans Koller, Wolfgang Dauner and Albert Mangelsdorff, who treated the musical zeitgeist in a similarly bold manner. Joos experimented in the vicinity of contemporary classical and electronic music, but then again soon with the possibilities of the natural sounds of the trumpet itself, right through to the alphorn.

Many of these companions became friends, so that it is not surprising Joos was able to assemble an all-star cast of improvisation culture for the award ceremony concert.

“Change of Beauty” is away of summing up, through the intertwining and contrast of dynamics, the principles of orchestral richness and are turn to the transparency of individual instruments. It is the growth of a sound organism, not linearly but rather in ever new, self-complementing approximations.