Les Rabiates & Artur Becker is a furious combination of border-crossing music and divisive poetry, influenced by current jazz trends and subterranean rock, an explosive mixture of eloquent, sometimes subversive lyrics and a bubbling, stylistically wildly rampant sound. The musical result can no longer be clearly classified: with its polka passages and reggae rhythms, which are also mixed with goose-step marches or apparent Volga romanticism, and the rock n punk offensives, this is no longer jazz, but rather a derivative of all sorts of things, which, in combination with Becker’s verses, is always on the trail of urban fury and madness.
In March, Artur Becker will receive the Adelbert von Chamisso Prize 2009 from the Robert Bosch Foundation! The quartet Les Rabiates is made up of the remnants of the Bremen underground jazz septet Swim Two Birds plus keyboardist Michael Berger. The current line-up: Achim Gätjen alto sax; Jens Ahlers drums; Ralf Benesch git, baritone sax; Michael Berger analogue keyboard instruments. The musical range is considerable. Based on a constantly driving beat, the band travels through the realms and lowlands of current music history.
Artur Becker is a post-communist melancholic, a sentimental rascal. He conjures up the glorious times when easily irritable, often drunk young men could still fight and drink to their heart’s content, fish for small whitefish and big women, and rebel against fathers, bigoted priests and the Esbecja, the Polish Stasi. (Faz)