Axel Dörner

Trumpet has its own mythical characters, and Chet Baker was their archetype, an expressionist depressive lost in the too burdensome history of jazz and his own obsession with the musical phrase. Axel Dörner would be his negative twin, no more lost in inner obsessions but rather in the practice of active listening in search of an abstractive potentiality for his instrument, within the sound as the only vibration subsisting in the air. What distances him from other jazz trumpet players is the disappearance of the phrase, until it reaches the core of the musical note which he then erases by working on a regular blowing, putting together abstract noises, miniatures of blowing.This abstraction recalls the new electronic aesthetics, a kind of sound that seems to lose its own particular acoustical quality as if generated by an electronic device to create a beautiful ambiguity of sound.---"Trumpet",A Bruit Secret 03(2001).

Axel Dörner
www.efi.group.shef.ac.uk/musician/mdorner.html