Jo Beyer
Jo Beyer
Jo Beyer – Live in Bangalore
The drummer and composer from Cologne performed with his band at a popular jazz venue in southern India. Even there, Jo Beyer’s original, boundary-breaking music thrilled the audience—a spectacular live presentation.
Bangalore – a bustling, hectic multimillion-person metropolis in southern India and the capital of the federal state of Karnataka. The Windmills, in the eastern part of the city, is a modern microbrewery with a fine restaurant and a concert stage—well established as a venue for live jazz. But was it a good place for a progressive, unconventional jazz quartet from Germany? This recording of the performance by drummer and composer Jo Beyer’s group leaves no doubt from the very first of its five high-energy tracks: “The Bullshit Talker” is a tour de force that only a band in perfect sync can deliver.
Jo Beyer recalls with delight: “Bangalore was toward the end of our India tour. We were really together, the room sounded incredible even at the soundcheck, the people were super cool—we had a really good time on stage. And there was no pressure from thinking ‘we’re recording an album here.’” The concert was routinely recorded by the club’s sound crew—audio and video at the highest technical level. A few days later, as the group headed to the airport, the Windmills experience was still resonating. Guitarist Andreas Wahl said what everyone was thinking: “We should do something with these recordings.”
“Live in Bangalore,” the third release by Jo Beyer’s band, is a godsend: a live album overflowing with spirited playing and energy that documents the music and the musical potential of the quartet in near-ideal form. One small compromise: you hear almost nothing of the audience’s sometimes frenzied enthusiasm—there were simply no microphones for that. Beyer still beams when he remembers all the people who bought tickets for a little-known band from Cologne, Germany. “It was wild. Afterwards people came up to us and said: I’ve never heard anything like that before, it totally blew me away. That was a resonance on another level between music and audience—emotional reactions you hardly ever see at concerts in Germany.” Perhaps also because in India it’s rare to see a German band with a bandleader who has such distinctive compositional ideas? “I noticed that people were extremely open, that it was easier overall to present music they might not have known before.” A feeling that matches his previous experiences with the idiosyncratic trio Malstrom in China or Japan.
A live album by this quartet has been long overdue not only because of the passage of time. Beyer founded the band in 2016 under the band name “Jo.” The debut album came the following year, followed by the BERTHOLD records album “Party” in 2019. During the early COVID period, there was a line-up change: a new pianist and keyboardist, Felix Elsner, joined. All the titles on “Live in Bangalore” already exist in studio versions. Not a drawback, says the bandleader—on the contrary. “I liked the idea! We’d played so much that the music has evolved dramatically, and the pieces have changed a lot. The interplay, the interaction, the improvisations—over the years it’s reached a whole new level. The way we play now is completely different. Plus, I really wanted at last to have an album with Felix”—who makes his mark with an emphatic solo straight off in the opening track.
One distinctive feature of Beyer’s band is that it has no bass … well—“wrongly expressed!” says the Cologner with a grin. “It’s not a law of nature that a band needs a bass! Freeing yourself from that can even remove a lot of stress. Of course, it makes sense to have a low-frequency foundation in rhythmic music. But you can achieve that differently—for example, by composing and arranging with that in mind from the start.” Jo Beyer, born in Essen, always composes at the piano, his first instrument; he only took up drums much later. In Felix Elsner he has found a pianist who brings everything essential for this band and its very special compositions. “The piano plays a particularly important role. It’s the basis on which everything is built. Much of it is written for that instrument. This band requires a very special way of playing the piano, beyond the usual for a traditional jazz pianist.” Saxophonist Sven Decker brought Elsner to his attention. “I watched some really old videos of him doing fusion stuff and I knew instantly: that’s exactly what I’m looking for—super rhythmic, super powerful.” Beyer also incorporates important rhythmic elements for guitar and sax.
The one-and-a-half-week tour of India in January 2024 came about through contact with an Indian agent based in Paris and was ultimately made possible by the local Goethe-Institut. “We played in extremely varied venues: from jazz clubs to festivals to ‘posher’ locations such as the Windmills.” Beyer himself handled the final mix of the multitrack recording. During the pandemic years, he had deliberately developed expertise in studio and sound technology. He has long composed film music and also—ever versatile—launched an avant-electro-pop project.
He has since dropped the original name of his band—it had often caused confusion and led to incorrect advertising. Now his full name stands for the four-piece group, which without doubt belongs to one of the most outstanding and original groups of the German jazz-and-beyond scene. More than ever, it has everything needed to shine far beyond—in whichever direction Jo Beyer takes it next. This stirring live recording underscores that.
