DESCRIPTION:
Interview LYN LEON (Carolyn Leonhart & Stephan Diethelm),
Berlin, 2005-09-13
By Stephan Oettel [.oettel@gmx.de]


1.) Carolyn, how did you hook up with Stephan Diethelm and Matthias Eser?

CAROLYN:
Got a call a while back, I guess, eight or nine years ago, from Stephan, out of the blue. They were this group called The Swiss Percussion Ensemble. It was a classically oriented group. They had been working with glass for a long time and had this idea to do an album setting poetry to music. And all the poems were in English so they were looking for an American singer. Someone recommended me to them and so they called me out of the blue and sent me their stuff. They invited me over to Switzerland for a weekend. We basically spent two days jamming in their barn. They had this beautiful big barn that had like every percussion instrument you can imagine and all the glass and lots of other stuff. After the first day I thought, this is too hard, I cant do this. It was very scary for me. And then I thought, well, I have one more day. Ill have to try it. And then the next day really, I felt like I really connected to what they were doing. I mean it wasnt just the glass which was so cool to sing with but the musicians were, it was so interesting, it was such an incredible challenge for me. So we did that CD called Glass Songs. From there we started performing, doing concerts. And then the three of us, Stephan, Matthias and I really started connecting and writing music together and realized that that had a very special collaborative quality to it. And so, the rest is history.

2.) What did fascinate you about the music of Stephan and Matthias?

CAROLYN:
Well, there were a lot of things. Of course the first thing was just the glass, the temper of the glass and everything was so beautiful to me. And then singing with it, I made a combination of sounds that Id never really experienced before. It was just so beautiful and I really loved that. But it was also that their writing, their conceptual ideas came out of places that Id never been before. They are both classically oriented but even their other inspiration was different from mine. We all came from different worlds of music. We could very easily have not had created our own language, musical language to speak in. But immediately we did. We all just connected something about each other. And it just worked. The more we started giving of ourselves to the project the more special it became. So I think its just one of those moments were you get lucky, when you realize, wow, you dont always get lucky like this so you have to go with it and make the most of it. And I think we continued to appreciate each others differences. I think we all like being challenged, musically and otherwise. So it continually gives us a new chance to experiment and try new stuff.
.) Stephan, why did you pick Carolyn as a singer to your music?

STEPHAN:
This is actually an accident.
CAROLYN:
It was a mistake.
STEPHAN:
No, we did a CD with a flute player, long, long ago. When we performed once in Italy there was a man, Gil Goldstein, who was there and saw us perform and he said: I love things you do. If you ever want a piece, Ill write something. And of course Gil Goldstein is a very known piano player and arranger for David Sanborn and Pat Metheny. So finally I called him and said that we were doing a CD with a piano player and asked he would write something for us. And he said, yes of course, Ill write something. And he did an arrangement of Ballon Song from Jaco Pastorius. We played that song. And when we came up with the idea to do something with a singer, I said, well Ill call Gil Goldstein, he knows so many people. So I called him and he said, yeah, I know somebody and gave me Carolyns number. So it was actually Zufall, coincidence. She came over and was interested in doing this. From there it started. Thats the little history of how we met Carolyn. Its actually Gils fault. He is married to a Swiss woman, thats the link where we got together; his wife, her best friends husband used to work with Matthias. Gil Goldstein did the Sketches Of Spain and things like that for Miles Davis, his last performance in Montreaux. And he played there, that flute player played there and that was the connection of how we got together with all these people. Gils fault, and it was good.