Aleksandar Grujic - GIV & Gaslight (2018)

Aleksandar Grujić (1974) graduated from the master studies at the Conservatory in Utrecht and a course of contemporary improvisation through the use of non-stop techniques at the Conservatory in Amsterdam. He has been rewarded several times with a jazz pianist and composer in the classics and jazz class (competition in Streza, Holland Casino Jazz & Pop Award ...) who has collaborated with compositions such as Balkanopolis, Amsterdam Sinfonietta, Metropole Orkest and others. He has performed at festivals such as Gaudeamus Festival, Uitfeest, Culturele Zondagen, Celtic Connection, Ohrid Summer Festival. He lectured at the Muziek Edukatie Centrum (Netherlands), and today he is a professor of jazz pianos at the Stankovic School. The member is a member of the Drama Organ Trio who published their edition "Dramathology" for Metropolis Jazz in November last year.

About his new edition of GIV & Gaslight published for the label Metropolis Jazz, Alexander says:

"The music on this album is composed of three creative expressions:

The GIV concept is the beginning of the realization of my musical ideas from the late 2000s, when I studied Contemporary Improvisation through Non-Western Techiques and MAX / MSP programming at the Amsterdam Conservatory, I started to blend block improvisation and software for interactively generating music contexts. Upon returning to Serbia in 2014 and 2015, I played a series of improvisational souvenirs at the then Cekaonica jazz club together with Igor Malesevic (drums) and Vladimir Samardzic (electric bass) using this concept. Then the idea of ​​the album was transformed into a decision to achieve it.

The Gaslight Trio is a formation formed as an antagonistic GIV idea. Unlike the GIV who had clear improvisation orders, Gaslight was a musical expression derived from the styly expressed ideas of the newcomers, Andelka Stupara (drums) and Milos Colovic (double bass), which naturally created for my perception, a whole new sound relying on partly on alternative ways of playing instruments and electronics, placed in forms similar to preludes and sequences with "attachments".

Other musical works are compositions and some "improvisations" that are partly created by generating music elements through software, and then added and shaped by my music bill or vice versa.

Some topics are reharmonized software, some melodies and "improvisations" were created by pressing the magic button "Random", using the function of random selection of tonal heights from certain scales, which are then rhythmically activated differently by the function of random assignment of beginnings and duration. In some songs, harmonic connections were created by connecting randomly chosen chord pairs from a pre-prepared MAX / MSP file. "