After a short but lovely break in a small turkish village, I’m back home, ready for the next concert season’s experiences. New things are about to happen: The cd ‘Trust’ with the Red Hill Orchestra, a trio with Ellery Eskelin and Dan Weiss, is being manufactured as I’m writing this and will be released in the beginning of november on the french label Yolk. I’m so happy with what it has become. The band and the music made me do stuff differently and make different moves, and I’m very grateful for that. So I’m looking forward very much to our tour in november, to see where it will bring us musically. When you watch a bit down and to the left on this page, you can see where it will bring us geographically. Before that I’ll be in northern India for a bit more than a week, to work and record with the tibetan monks of the Gyuto monastery near Dharamsala. It’s a project with the band Octurn, and besides me there’s Bo Van der Werf on saxophone and Dre Pallemaerts on drums. And this year I’ll have the change to record and perform with the duo with electro/vocal artist Lynn Cassiers (Lilly Joel) and the replique montre suisse one with one of my favorite piano-players, Benoît Delbecq. Other encounters include a piano-trio with two other great piano-players, Fulco Ottervanger and Kris Davis (in february 2015, carte blanche of Fulco), a quartet-tour organized by Teun Verbruggen with Arve Henriksen and Stian Westerhus (january 2015) and a couple of new projects around saxophonist Alban Darche (2015).
But besides all that and more, I count on playing solo quite a bit, at home and on stage. It’s an adventure I start to like more and more and I would love to go deeper into it. And I planned quite some time off as well, to slow down more, to take the time to think and feel, to practice and study, and to surrender to the useless (the most important thing to do, if you ask me) and to see what’s next.I’m wondering.