Swim Two Birds - History
The band Swim Two Birds is surely one of the most outstanding discoveries in the German scene this decade. Traditionally critics and audiences except New York to exhibit the latest metropolitan hipness in avant-garde-music…
Swim Two Birds have drawn their own conclusions: their sound is explosive, risky, rebellious. A critic once named their music: “No Wave Jazz Punk Noise Funk Call It anything” … and he was right.
For more than ten years and with changing line-ups, the seven-person band around saxophonist and composer Achim Gätjen has been working on music that, on a swinging jazz basis, repeatedly draws on other genres and incorporates new material into the band’s universe. At first, it sometimes even sounded like the harsh escapades of John Zorn, and the friendship with the Universal Congress Of, which revitalized jazz with the energy of hardcore under the aegis of Joe Baizas, was almost inevitable.
On stage, this phase is still honored with the composition “Salomon Grundy”. The new material from Swim Two Birds still shines with stylistic openness, but seems much more compact, as can be heard on the new album “No Regrets” (Laika Records). As band leader and saxophonist Achim Gätjen once told us in an interview: “My goal was always to create a band that performs as a unit.”
The songs move virtuosically between big band styles, western guitars, rock, mariachi, sinister, dragged-out blues and a lot more – without becoming even remotely stylistically fragmented. Singer GU tells bizarre stories from the hours between night and day between recitation and crooning. Even “Hubcaps & Taillights” by Henry Mancini and the Perry Mason theme fit in, as if Swim Two Birds had thought it up themselves.
What we were supposed to be sold some time ago as part of the much-vaunted but never really taken off here swing revival is old news, limited and conservative compared to what these people are doing here.
