Fire!

quot;...Fire!' Once upon a time or not. Maybe it's happening right now. In any case, somewhere, somehow- perhaps in Berlin, New York or Gotham City- a shady guy with a pale tint and faded elegance sneaks around the corner. Nobody ever really knew him but his name resoundes throughout the city. With his coat collar turned up and a cheap carnation on the revers, he orbits in a constellation of his own design. Johnny La Marama: a gangster out of passion with the tendency to shoot himself in the foot. A twilight-iguana who, after a successful bank robbery, can't find his car keys and gets caught; only to latter escape prison by hiding inside the warden's birthday cake. ... This Johnny La Marama has a sound, a groove, a melody as sinister and adventurous as his nature. Johnny La Marama is a band from Berlin. The Finnish guitarrist Kalle Kalima, the New York bassist Chris Dahlgren and the German drummer Eric Schaefer compile dozens of musical preferences and experiences from their cardinal points. But, unlike numerous other projects in the wide fields of the Berlin jazz scene, the musicians turn out as a real band. A band in which a lot of things happen spontaneously, but few things happen by chance. On their new CD quot;...Fire!quot;, inspite of the music's openness, they sound so tight and self-contained that it's hard to trace back which intention, which impulse and which element goes back to which initiator. And while most of the pieces on quot;...Fire!quot; come the invidual band members, they sound as if they were written by a single person. Johnny La Marama is no trio in the classical sense, but an intuitive unity. quot; Although we only improvised in the beginningquot;, drummer Eric Schaefer remembers the beginning four years ago, quot; it worked out immediatly, because we like a similar kind of music, and need a comparable level of freedom. It came naturally for us to find a common language to develop this collective sound that we brought from three different directions. We all pull together concerning our musical style, which shows influences of, for instance, Post Rock, Metal, Drum'n'Bass, New Classical Music, Captain Beefheart and Frank Zappa.quot; The album title's accordance to an authorized Zappa bootleg is mere chance. But Zappa's historical question quot;Does humor belong in music?quot; runs through the CD like a thread, connecting all of the tracks, which run between ten minutes and four seconds. If there is a conceptional umbrella term for Johnny La Marama at all, then maybe 'urban blues grotesques'. Urban because of the noise and the open and subliminal hectic-ness of the tracks, blues because of the guitar and the nocturnal flair of the pieces, and humor that doesn't make you laugh out but invites you to smile beningly. quot; Some of the tracks on the record are actually simple bluesquot;, Schaefer says, quot; that only sound more complicated because we added something. Actually, it's the principle of call and response; we always give each other enough space to respond to calls. There is no traditional role allocation like a soloist and a accompanyist. Through the groove, we open common rooms, and slowly develop within this architecture. When we played together for the first time there were already noticable song structures. It was astounding to ourselves, how logical our pieces developed. There always was a certain groove, some kind of undertow to something juicy between HipHop, Drum'n'Bass and Rock. Even though there amay be a lot of breaks within one track, we don't try to