 The first album by David Fettmann with his own group starts furiously. "Will's Blues" (Track 1) starts at top speed, and the walking bass of Sebastien Maire is almost at the speed of sound. However, the album "Prelude" is not at all a showroom for technical expertise. Fettmann and Co. do not search for easy listening either, although he himself refers to a few pieces as "pop songs". The amiable, bright ballad "Mini-Mal" (track 3) is an example of such a pop song. The following song "Pisces" could also be designated as such, and it also proves that even weird meters can swing. It is a question of lightness and simple tones, a question of the opposite of excessive intellectual weight in spite of the high demands on the music and the extreme virtuosity. And it is a question of team spirit, not egotism. After all, Fettmann chose the piano/sax duet "Prelude" (track 5) composed by his friend Sebastian Sternal as title song. "Prelude" recorded in the Parisian Sysmo Records Studio closes with the composition "This Love Affair" (track 8) of the singer/songwriter Rufus Wainwright. This ultimately underlines Fettmann's penchant for the idiom of pop songs. The 33-year-old David Fettmann (born in Strasbourg) has a Master's Degree in jazz (received at the Lemmens Institute in Leuven, Belgium) and Bachelor's in music (from the Conservatorium van Amsterdam, Netherlands) as well as a diploma in jazz from the National Conservatory in Nice, France where he even was awarded first prize in the category of jazz saxophone. He is a member of the Orchestre de Jazz de la Musique de l’Armée de l’Air and the ONJL (Orchestre National Jazz Luxembourg), which gave him the possibility to perform alongside of George Duke, Paquito D’Rivera and Didier Lockwood. Sebastian Sternal, born in 1983, started learning piano at the young age of six and then discovered jazz five short years later. He studied under John Taylor and Frank Chastenier, among others, and was awarded the WDR Jazz Prize in the "Improvisation" category in 2007. His own debut album ("Eins"; DMCHR 71078) was released by Double Moon Records in 2009 in the Jazz thing Next Generation series. As Sternal, Sebastien Maire also started to play music when he was six, but his first instruments were the trumpet and a chromatic harmonica. He discovered the bass guitar when he was 15 and added the contrabass at 18, which he then studied at the National Conservatory in Nancy starting form 1996. He later played along Didier Lockwood, Henri Salvador, Nicoletta and—in a trio with Pierre Perchaud—also with drummer Julien Jolly. Jolly and Maire got to know and appreciate each other at the "Centre des Musiques Didier Lockwood". Jolly completed his drum studies there in 2003. Today, he teaches at the music school of Noisy Le Roi. In addition to playing in the David Fettmann Quartet, he is currently involved in various interesting projects such as the "Allan Stocker Memorial Club" and "Jesus Loved Electro".
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