Beware the Buffoon!
Sweet Superman
Rope Dancer
Are Your Feet Light Enough?
If You Gaze Long into an Abyss…
Off Balance
Eternal Recurrence
Eternal Recurrence
…The Abyss Will Gaze Back into You
The Master Can’t Dance
The Convalescent
The Laughing Child

The award-winning Dutch composer and bass clarinet player Joris Roelofs is also currently working on a PhD dissertation on Friedrich Nietzsche, improvisation and the notion of freedom. On the album Rope Dance he is able to combine all of this, in a suite of twelve pieces inspired by Nietzsche – 'by far the most musical of philosophers' according to Roelofs. It is especially the parable of the tightrope walker in the opening section of 'Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for All and None' that has provided him with inspiration for his own 'Light-Footed Music for All and None'.

It is not surprising that Nietzsche's thoughts about free spirits, liberated from conventional constraints and belief systems, resonate particularly well with musicians working with improvisation and across genres. Roelofs has therefore been able to gather a group of highly versatile colleagues from the Benelux jazz scene to perform his music: pianist Bram de Looze, bass player Clemens van der Feen and Martijn Vink on drums. The album also confirms the multi- faceted talents of bassoonist Bram van Sambeek, following previous recordings on BIS of classical, pre- Romantic and contemporary concertos, as well as hard rock covers with the group ORBI (the Oscillating Revenge of the Background Instruments).

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Recording: January 2020 at Studio 2, Muziekcentrum van de Omroep, Hilversum, The Netherlands. Instrumentarium: Bassoon: Heckel 1970, serial number 11174; bocal: Heckel cc 1; Bass clarinet: Buffet Crampon Prestige 1193; Grand Piano: Steinway B.