Andreas Waelti | projects

Transit Room

Clemens Salesny - alto sax | Samuel Blaser - trombone

Samuel Halscheidt - guitar | Andreas Waelti - bass | Tobias Backhaus - drums

An extremely exciting, young band is the sextet Transit Room, which was founded by the Swiss bassist Andreas Waelti. The band members are from various countries, several of whom also compose. Team spirit plays a not to be underestimated role in Transit Room, so that you don't have to suffer endless solo digressions as a listener (musicians are working here, who have understood that the era of heroic 20-minute solos has ended), but instead can savor the enhancing effect of individual skills thanks to the great variety of conceptual standards.

Jazz tradition is not treated like a fetish here, but instead creates the foundation for a labyrinthine, entwined Transit Room, which leads from the clarity of classicism to the wild deconstructivism of the post-modern.Transit Room beats out a path from the erotic nonsense of Strayhorn ballads to the action-abstraction of Eric Dolphy's «Out to Lunch». It makes certain that the music does not sound like an echo of distant times, but instead like a modern-day, urgent scream. Musical components are not simply pasted together cleverly, but instead put into relationships in such a way that they stimulate each other and generate a kind of meta-music in intermediate spaces of vibration. (Tom Gsteiger)