artists
Thomas Sauerborn
Freedom and originality in long-term synergies and solo performance.
Thomas Sauerborn appreciates the profound synergies of long-standing musical collaborations as well as the magic of spontaneous encounters with other improvisers. For the drummer and composer, ‘metamusic’ is the fusion of individual musicians into a coherent whole. It creates space for a maximum level of freedom and originality, from which trust arises and which reflects on the audience.
These include the experimental trip music band Das Ende der Liebe, whose latest album SCHNE*E was voted one of the top 20 albums of 2022 by GROOVE magazine. Or Mount Meander with Lucas Leidinger, Kārlis Auziņš and Tomo Jacobson, who have released two internationally acclaimed albums on the Portuguese label Cleanfeed, among others. Cologne-based trio Pollon with Theresia Philipp and David Helm, whose latest album ΔΔΔΔΔΔ was nominated for the German Jazz Award 2023.
Since 2015, Sauerborn has dedicated himself to his unaccompanied solo project [zimbel], for which he has developed his own notation and, with little more than a single suspended cymbal, knows how to improvise on it in a varied and reflective way. Sauerborn studied at the Conservatorium van Amsterdam and the Hochschule für Musik und Tanz Köln and continued his studies at the Rytmisk Musikkonservatorium in Copenhagen with a DAAD scholarship. It was there that he began to focus even more intensively on free improvisation and solo music. [zimbel| has developed into an exploration of the sonic possibilities of an instrument that is normally used in an ensemble context: The suspended cymbal becomes the centrepiece and opens up a new universe of sound through its delicate playing. Sauerborn is guided by the idea that great musical worlds can be created even in the smallest of things.