"Short Stories" shows how masterfully and innovatively Jansen and Braun have mastered their instruments.
Arne Jansen, Stephan Braun: Short Stories
This is a really good story. This was the conclusion reached by the international media when Arne Jansen and Stephan Braun released their first album together. On "Going Home", Jansen, "one of the best and most versatile German guitarists" according to the Süddeutsche Zeitung, and Braun, his congenial partner on cello and double bass, interpreted pieces by the legendary rock band Dire Straits in a surprisingly different way. "Howlingly beautiful" was the verdict of Kulturnews magazine, while FAZEmag attested to the duo's "intoxicating modesty". The US magazine Stereophile put it most succinctly: "What fun this album is!"
For their new recording, the two busy musicians, who have performed alongside Melody Gardot, Nils Landgren, Till Brönner, Nils Wülker, Anders Jormin and Orchestra Baobab in the past, issued the following guideline: We tell our own stories. "We often performed with the Dire Straits program," says guitarist Jansen, "and we also interspersed our own material, as we don't normally do covers, but compose them ourselves. After the concerts, people kept coming up to us and saying that they thought these songs were particularly great."
Based on this, "Short Stories" now consists, with two exceptions, of pieces that were written especially for the recording. The distribution of roles between Jansen and Braun is also significantly different to that on the first album. While the guitarist was something of a singer on six strings and responsible for the melodies on the Dire Straits homage, it is now also Braun who provides the themes on cello and bass or solos virtuosically - for example in the incredibly touching "The Way of Truth" or the dynamic "96 Minutes".
"With us, you have this complete equality in every respect," Braun enthuses about the two-man constellation, "due to the nature of our instruments, we can act as soloists but also accompany just as well. This give and take is great." Jansen adds: "People often think in terms of genre boundaries. Such an ideological way of thinking is not our thing at all. For us, it's all about working together; we always want to make the other sound better."
Apart from that, the guitarist adds, his musical counterpart is a pioneer of cello playing: "He comes from a classical background, but thinks like a jazz saxophonist and still has this groove thing and the use of effects. I can't think of that many other cellists!" Jansen is not alone in this opinion: US guitar star Pat Metheny once wrote Braun an enthusiastic fan e-mail after seeing his cello videos on YouTube.
"Short Stories" shows how masterfully and innovatively Jansen and Braun have mastered their instruments - thanks to special playing techniques and the use of delays, loops and volume pedals, it often sounds like much more than just a duo. It's as if you can hear synthesizers, the rhythmic scraping of a drum brush or finely pulsating grooves. The narrative thread that holds everything together is friendship. You can hear in every note that Jansen and Braun have known each other for ages and are deeply connected. "We live very close to each other in the north of Berlin, have children of the same age and a lot of common topics of conversation. When we're out and about together, we're actually chatting the whole time," laughs Braun.
The ten pieces on "Short Stories" are characterized by this desire to communicate and the confidence to be able to reveal even the innermost feelings freely. Each composition has its own narrative approach. Sometimes the stories, which range between jazz, folk, pop and Americana, have a decidedly literary background. For example, "Dolphin Hotel", "In a Hundred Years" or "For Ever and Ever" unfold their own poetry based on novels and poems such as Haruki Murakami's "Wild Sheep Hunt", Wolfgang Herrndorf's "Tschick" or A.A. Milne's "The End". Other pieces transform travel memories into intimate instrumental dialogues - the inspiration for "Where Once the Water Flowed" comes from a mind-expanding hike through a dried-up riverbed in Provence, while "The Trees Remember" is based on a visit to an enchanted, abandoned village in Istria.
And then again, these stories have a strong personal background. Like the casually strolling "Song for Issa", for example, with which Jansen and Braun bow to the great griot storyteller Issa Cissokho, the saxophonist of Orchestra Baobab who died in 2019. Or "The Way of Truth", which refers to a key experience in Jansen's student days. "I was part of Yehudi Menuhin's 'Live Music Now' program, which gives students the opportunity to give concerts in social institutions," the guitarist recalls. "Once we performed as a duo in a hospital and there was a patient my age who was dying right in front of me. I played completely differently. It was suddenly all about digging as deep as possible inside me to give this woman something good. That's when I realized: this is why I make music. The older I get, the clearer it becomes: I want to tell something truthful."
"Short Stories" is full of this humble restraint. Like any good storyteller, Jansen and Braun leave room for the unsaid, opening up spaces for interpretation with long reverberations in the listener's mind. Just like the specialty of songwriting genius Bob Dylan, with whose "A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall" the recording ends. Jansen thinks it's crazy how topical this song, which was written in the wake of the Cuban Missile Crisis, is. Together with the apocalyptic, heat-shimmering "Before the Rain" penned by the guitarist, the Dylan song gives the album a narrative bracket that is reminiscent of a famous quote by Leonard Bernstein: "This will be our answer to violence: To make music more intense, more beautiful, more devoted than ever before." With "Short Stories", Arne Jansen and Stephan Braun are doing their part to turn these words into sonic reality.
