The Swiss trio divr – pianist-sound artist Philipp Eden, double bass player Raphael Walser, and drummer Jonas Ruther – defies easy classification. The music is neither jazz nor minimalism, neither pop nor electronic music. The trio works collectively and without hierarchy, as its three voices intertwine in real time. Each performance thus becomes a living, fragile composition.
Live At Cully Jazz is divr’s sophomore album, captured live at the Cully Jazz festival in Switzerland in April 2023, and follows Is This Water (We Jazz, 2024). It is a 30-minute set, played at the now-closed Sweet Basil, one of the festival’s most intimate venues. The trio played three sets before an attentive, appreciative audience.
The second set, featured in Live At Cully Jazz, felt magical. The music distilled divr’s qualities – an intimate, organic-telepathic flow and synchronicity of the music, enhanced by the venue’s energy, shaped by time and the many great musicians who had played there before, and the deeply listening audience. This set highlights divr’s introspective and minimalist, disciplined and collective, poetic dynamics, patiently and cleverly suggesting a dramatic narrative.
The first four pieces are divr’s new original pieces. The last piece, «Echo answer», is a cover of the British experimental pop band Broadcast (which already appeared in Is This Water). The trio says that it felt perfectly right, «as if thought and matter had dissolved into pure sound».
Eyal Hareuveni
Philipp Eden (piano), Raphael Walser (double bass), Jonas Ruther (drums)
