David Helbock/ Simon Frick: Wo wir toben, ist oben

Louis Armstrong coined one of the most important sentences about music: “Jazz is only what you are”. And what David Helbock and Simon Frick are, can be heard immediately: Old school buddies. The way the two of them play off one another - provoking, stimulating and thereby understanding blindly – revealing their craftsmanship and connoisseurship. Thanks to the phenomenal technology and giant leaps across stylistic trenches, this musical chumming around still even sounds exciting and fresh.

Without fearing to make a kaboom and bubbling with ideas, this Austrian cocktail seizes upon Balkan folk music, classical music, rock, soul, jazz, experimental, free style, swing, nonsense - on instruments and non-instruments – and gives them all a hearty shake. The resulting concoction sounds like the metal-working industry meeting up with the Catholic Church, explosive and filled with brilliant vitality and intoxicating sensuality.

Interaction is top priority for both these exceptional musicians. By pushing the limits to the sound of piano and violin and by using percussion and all kinds of effect devices, their music twitches in constantly surprising directions (“Just a Serious Joke”). On the track “Herzberger”, Simon Frick mutates from a successful gypsy café violinist to a rock guitarist whose rosin’s turned flaky, then twirls abruptly into a world of sound by Arnold Schönberg, finally landing in wild noise. The calmer tracks reveal the proximity to classical modernism and yet are flawless jazz. An uprising is constantly lurking behind musical decency. At every musical corner, a stylistic robber is ambushing habit and transporting it to a foreign land (Seemanslied).

David Helbock, 27 yr. old, a zany looking instigator of abrupt changes with a preference for groove loops doused in gospel, is from Koblach. He has pocketed a classical concert pianist diploma and various jazz courses, numerous awards and scholarships, for example, second place and the audience prize at the jazz pianist competition in Montreux. David Helbock was currently awarded the “Outstanding Artist Award 2011” in the category music that was presented on Sept. 30th at the RadioKulturhaus in Vienna, Austria. As an accomplished drummer he can’t refrain from deploying an entire arsenal of percussion instruments apart from the electronic effects and toys during and away from a concert, as in his one year compositional project “My Personal Realbook” whereby he wrote a new piece every day for one year.

Simon Frick, 27 yr. old, is from Bludenz and has a particular affinity to rock music. He studied classical violin with Josef Sabaini and Werner Neugebauer as well as “Jazz and Popular Music” with Andreas Schreiber and has concentrated on free, experimental and new music. He expands the acoustic sounds of the violin literally using a storm of effects to create an orchestral cosmos of sound and, among other things, he composes rock pieces for the solo violin.

Two wandering dervishes proving the sales drivel and drabble of those self-appointed multi-stylists to be wrong, those who are stuck inside the box, unable to think outside it. Helbock and Frick literally jump out of the box. And more important: They simply make music together.