Posted on Leave a comment

New CD: Marie and Jean-Claude Séférian – Invitation au Voyage

FM 390 CD, Download & Stream

Streaming:     https://glmmusic.de/InvitationauVoyage

“Invitation au voyage” – the new album by singing duo Marie and Jean-Claude Séférian invites you to travel to places of longing and satisfy your wanderlust. Whether in reality or in the imagination, father and daughter take us on a musical journey with their reinterpretation of chansons and songs from different corners of the world.

The name “Séférian” means nothing other than “the travelers” and, significantly, this program was created during the Corona period. In order to escape their own four walls, they let themselves be carried by the music with their singing and rediscovered countries, cities and cultures for themselves.

“Music is emotion, imagination and movement. That’s why we dedicate part of our program to the fragile world situation and sing about people’s longing for peace and freedom,” explains jazz singer Marie Séférian, whose voice, delicate, incredibly slender and at the same time full of expressiveness, runs through the pieces like brightly shining lines. Her father Jean-Claude Séférian, who is considered one of the few authentic interpreters of French chanson in Germany, blends their voices in a congenial way with his warm and powerful timbre, always carried by the soundscape that Christiane Séférian spreads out for them on the piano.

After the successful program “Un Homme et une Femme”, which Marie and Jean-Claude Séférian presented from the Elbphilharmonie Hamburg to the Deutsches Theater in Munich, their new program “Invitation au voyage” alternates songs by Charles Aznavour, Jacques Brel and other greats of chanson with jazz standards and original compositions. In addition to French chanson classics such as “Paroles Paroles” and chart hits such as “Voyage voyage”, they perform the Latin hit “Besame mucho” in Spanish, the famous Duke Ellington song “Take the A-Train” in English and their own composition “Auf Wiedersehen” in German – their universal language always remains the language of music.

Marie & Jean Claude Séférian (vocals), Christiane Rieger Séférian (piano), Julia Czerniawska (violin), Tim Kleinsorge (bass), Javier Reyes (drums & percussion)

Posted on Leave a comment

New Releases on Spotify:


Listen to our new releases on Spotify with this link:

Click on the button to load the content from open.spotify.com.

Load content

Posted on Leave a comment

New Single “Paco” out now!

Cornelius Claudio Kreusch & Joscho Stephan

Single from the album High Wire, Release 21.02.2025

FM 413

Listen here::    https://glmmusic.de/HWPaco

CD, Download und Streaming

These two iconic players meet here for the first time in an TRIBUTE to PACO DE LUCIA. The composition “PACO” was written by CCK immediately upon getting the sad news of Paco’s passing. The song however wants to express the joy, passion and melancholic sentiment for this eternal legend of the Flamenco tradition and music world..

This single marks the first of a series of singles/videos that will be released prior to the album launch of the album of this power-duo in February of 2025. The album will be called: “HIGHWIRE”. Just like the tightrope-walk …

Posted on Leave a comment

Out now! Marion & Sobo Band – Gomera

FM 388-2     CD, Download und Streaming

Shop here!

Gypsy swing, also known as hot jazz or jazz manouche, is celebrating a powerful comeback. Many groups and guitarists are currently revitalising it. The Marion & Sobo Band can lay claim to not only marrying the only European jazz style coined by Django Reinhardt in the 1930s with other genres in an enchanting and compelling way, but also freeing it from its instrumental cage and transferring it to chanson and vocal jazz.

On their last album “Histoires”, Marion Lenfant-Preus, Alexander “Sobo” Sobocinski and their fellow musicians already brought these new colours to life in rousing musical stories and brought “the sound of Django Reinhardt into the present in a poppier way than ever before”, as Jazzthing magazine wrote. On their new album “Gomera”, the palette is even more colourful. As the title suggests, it is dedicated to the scenically and culturally diverse Canary Island, where the two have spent many winters since 2016 and collected many song ideas.

They both love nature and hiking, they incorporate the emotions and feelings of their travels from Cuba to Colombia – and often to the Canary Islands – into their music and lyrics and curiously seek a different view of the world. What could be more inspiring than the overwhelming landscapes of the volcanic island of Gomera? “For the first time, actually, there is a common thread running through one of our albums: nature,” says Marion. Right from the start, “Epina Swing” is about the island’s mountains, the strong winds blowing in from the Atlantic and bending the trees – all wrapped up in the story of a painter who searches for the colours of nature on her hikes. In “Promesse”, the luminous starry sky plays a leading role, in which a boy lying in the sand searches for answers. “Playa de Vueltas” describes the tranquillity that the sea can radiate.

As colourful as the tools of nature have made Gomera, Marion and Sobo’s homage to the island is just as musically diverse. Onomatopoeic vocalises and scat passages lend the typical hot style of “Epina Swing” a special touch, Brazilian flair surrounds “Promesse”, “Moon” peeks into fusion jazz and “Opa Cupa” takes us into the sound world of the Balkans. Marion and Sobo’s versions of the swing standard “Puttin’ On The Ritz” and the classic Cuban bolero “Veinte Años” prove just how amazingly different music created in the same era can be, while also demonstrating how modern such evergreens can sound thanks to creative imagination.

In any case, it is a central concern and a great merit of the Marion & Sobo Band to transform the familiar into the new, to bring tradition into the present. The best example of this is “Amour Supreme”, the story of a man lost in life who reads French poetry in the evening to free himself from the chains of everyday life. Sobo plays a gypsy jazz guitar here with the “steamer” introduced by Django Reinhardt for more volume, but at the same time the song breaks with the gypsy swing sound and repertoire: framed in a chanson style, Marion quotes passages of poetry in fast, rap-like chanting.

Languages are a general theme in Marion’s feather-light, yet powerful and incredibly variable vocals anyway. In the songs on “Gomera”, she sings in French, English, Spanish, Romani and German. In

“Playa de Vueltas”, flamenco rumba meets French lyrics. And Django Reinhardt’s “Les Yeux Noirs (Dark Eyes)” is deliberately bilingual. Of course, the biographies of the protagonists are also condensed in the polyphony of the Marion & Sobo band.

Marion Lenfant-Preus has an American father and a French mother and thus grew up in France with the best of both worlds, with Ella Fitzgerald’s scat and jazz singing and the harmonies and melodies of US jazz as well as Django Reinhardt’s percussive guitar sound and its ingredients of European classical music, Jewish klezmer and Balkan music. Alexander “Sobo” Sobocinski grew up in Poland and began playing guitar at the age of 15, initially influenced by the fusion bands of the seventies. During his studies in the Netherlands, he discovered his passion for gypsy jazz and focussed more on the acoustic guitar.

They have both travelled a lot and tried out a lot. They have been an inseparable creative team ever since they got to know each other playfully, so to speak, at a jam session in Bonn in 2010. Violinist Frank Brempel and double bassist Stefan Berger also joined them during sessions at “Café Göttlich”, and together with guitarist Jonas Vogelsang they now form the perfectly matched Marion & Sobo Band. With their third album “Gomera”, the band proves once and for all that handmade, acoustic music can not only be delicate, contemplative and colourful, but also highly energetic and powerful, even without drums. And thus creates a new gypsy jazz that embraces the world.

Marion Lenfant-Preus – vocals

Alexander „Sobo“ Sobocinski – guitar

Frank Brempel – violin

Stefan Berger – bass

Jonas Vogelsang – guitar

Posted on Leave a comment

New release: Quadro Nuevo – Happy Deluxe

The music of Quadro Nuevo radiates the joy of an adventurous life. Every melody tells of it. Every note reflects the deep love for the instrument. Every journey shapes the extravagant musicianship of the ensemble.

Shop here!

The band members once spent tango nights in Buenos Aires. They returned from a daring trip across the Balkans with a Gitanesque swing. They sailed through the Aeolian Islands on the trail of ancient myths, climbed lava-spewing volcanoes in Iceland and celebrated triumphs in the Carnegie Hall of New York’s jazz metropolis.

And it was also travel that inspired the musicians on their new album Happy Deluxe:
“On the Greek islands, we found the magnetic 80s song Erotiko by Nikos Xydakis. We developed an instrumental arrangement from it and shot a video on Santorini: the vastness of the Aegean, ancient statues and our hands on the instruments.”
Most recently, the virtuosos toured Brazil, intoxicating themselves with pulsating samba, lively chorinho and sunny bossa nova. They roamed through jungles to the wild beaches of the island of Ilha Grande, where the song of the same name was composed.
Several times they found the world’s best Caipirinha – not only on the Copacabana – and paid homage to it with a relaxed little song.

In Rio de Janeiro, they rehearsed for days in the shimmering midday heat, swarmed
out in the evenings, threw themselves into the scene and then went into the studio: daring improvisations, sometimes swinging high into the buzzing air, sometimes diving into glittering seas, sometimes chillingly spun in daydreams and night owls.
The result is the new album HAPPY DELUXE.