Peter Protschka - Organic Universe (2022)

The history of hammond organ jazz is very closely connected to my personal musical biography with my good friend and musical companion Clemens Orth - and with two important places for us in Cologne, where we have both been living for some years. Clemens had only recently returned from New York City, where he had studied and lived for three years, when we met in Cologne in 2006. I had also traveled to New York many times since 2003 after studying in Mannheim to take lessons, go to sessions and listen to great music. I had also toyed with the idea of living there for a while.

In the end though, I had moved my center of life back to Cologne in the mid-2000s. Clemens and I played our first gigs together here and in the region, and it came to my attention that amongst other things, he was also a terrific organist. I already had a connection to the great church organ, as did Clemens, because we both grew up with church music and took our first professional steps in these sacred spaces.

In 2005 - fortunately for all who had the chance to experience it – Clemens had started to host a late night session with his big Hammond B3 in the legendary Cologne scene club STEKKEN. The mighty instrument remained on site and Clemens could be heard there almost weekly on Thursday nights in a wide variety of lineups with the most talented cats of the Cologne jazz scene. This club and the nightly sessions were “real jazz” in every sense of the word: there was heavy smoking (weed and cigarettes…) without any ventilation system, the band started very late and didn’t stop until the early morning hours. The audience partied with the band and didn’t leave until the music was finished. Here we played together very often and spent many memorable nights. When the club closed in 2013, the Hammond organ concerts shifted to Clemens’ own jazz club, the “Salon de Jazz”, which will continue to offer a great program in Cologne’s Südstadt after its complete renovation starting in summer 2022.

Here we tried out organ band formats in a wide variety of lineups until the one heard on this recording emerged. A line up can be heard here that is very rare in this form: The orchestral playing style that Clemens employs on the organ mixes in a very special way with the two horn players and the very transparent percussion work of Silvio Morger. We have consciously recorded only our own original music, which seemed to us to be suitable and viable for this particular instrumentation and which transports the sound of the organ quartet into the here and now. We hope you enjoy the result as much as we did making it.