Tizian Jost

United In the Big Blue Tizian Jost

It sounds like a fairy tale from a better time. In the 1990’s, when Tizian Jost would show up at a jazz club with a bass player and a drummer, the guests were truly glad to be able to listen to a piano trio once again. Today, however, they would frown at the idea. Since the trio innovations of “trend-setters” Keith Jarrett and Brad Mehldau, the expansion of this improvisational triangle has known no bounds, regardless of all the talk of a crisis in jazz. Maybe it is also a German phenomenon to latch on to someone like Titian Jost. If someone would label Jost the prototype of the “artist deserving greater recognition”, they would not be far from the truth. Despite his seminal duos with saxophonist-friend Günther Klatt (whose death in December of 2012 at the age of 55 was much too early), despite his many celebrated collaborations with the likes of Till Brönner, Till Martin, Stephan Holstein, and Paulo Morello, Jost remains one of the best kept secrets of the national jazz scene. In jazz-loving Japan, however, he is a star. There the Atelier Sawano label has sold more than 20,000 of his four trio CDs, the last being the 2010 “We’ll Meet Again”. The reason? Jazz enjoys a completely different status in the land of the rising sun; it is a part of high culture, on the same level as classical music, the theater, ballet, and the fine arts. It also has to do with an inexplicable magic that the piano exerts on the Far Eastern ear, even in this era of digital overload. And then there is the Japanese’s strange weakness for elegantly constructed, subtly swinging melancholy, the sort of sound cosmos that Thelonious Monk, Bill Evans, and McCoy Tyner began to stake out, and that Titian Jost, with his natural creative power, gracefully continues to interpret.