Photo: © PublicJazz events

PRESENTED BY SPARKASSE GELSENKIRCHEN

Workshop Concert with Caroll Vanwelden [B]

Caroll Vanwelden is an experienced musician who forges her own path. Highly prolific, with an impressive discography, she is dedicated to freeing jazz from any risk of self-referentiality. To this end, she has been pursuing a lifelong project for over a decade: musically, compositionally, and improvisationally, she works her way through Shakespeare’s sonnets—which, as is well known, are compositions in their own right. She draws musical material from Shakespeare’s language, the meter, the specific textures, and rhythms—material that has resulted in three albums and is now taking a new turn with “Social & Live — Supposing Shakespeare Revisited.”

Before becoming a singer, Caroll Vanwelden was an engineer. She earned her degree in Brussels and then moved on to the Guildhall School of Music and Drama in London. It’s a background that explains a lot—the unpretentious elegance of her arrangements, the decisiveness with which she selects material. NDR named her first Shakespeare album “Album of the Week.” But her Shakespeare project, her Shakespeare art, is anything but an ego trip. This is evident in her interaction with her finely tuned band: a cello capable of both thunder and street sounds, accompanied by light-footed percussion. Her refined, agile vocals and the decisiveness of her arrangements guarantee an exciting live experience. With Vanwelden, Shakespeare isn’t treated like a museum piece, but kept alive. No longer a stranger to FineArtJazz, she, too, brings brand-new material to the festival.

But this concert is not just about the music; it’s also about the lyrics. It’s a combination of music and English lessons that will encourage the audience to pay closer attention to the lyrics of her music as well.

With the generous support of Sparkasse Gelsenkirchen, in cooperation with Leibniz High School and Annette von Droste-Hülshoff High School