THE TRANSVERSE FLUTIST With his quartet Oliver Roth plays contemporary jazz, which oscillates between action and abstraction as well as charm and aggression: exciting, different, diverse music which does not fit into "the mainstream" of jazz. Simply music, which awakens emotions. Music which transports the breakthrough spirit of seminal recordings such as Ornette Coleman's "The Shape of Jazz to Come", Jimmy Giuffre's "Fusion", "Thesis" and "Free Fall" as well as Eric Dolphy's "Out to lunch" in an independent and creative way. Roth, who studied classical music as well as jazz, is a bridge builder starting from the urgency and the momentum of jazz music in which he develops the melodious variety of the new music and the procedural character of the free improvisation, which in spite of their formal subtleties leave a lot of room for intuitive "instant composing". Apart from die-hard new musicians such as Robert Dick or Matthias Ziegler there are hardly any musicians in the jazz-scene who exclusively play the flute. Roth does not concentrate himself on the flute but, rather, he consciously dispenses with wasting time. Hence, it is possible for him to work on his sound and style (which is already impressive). For his quartet Roth selected musicians who wish more than merely wildly getting on with playing. Roth's compositions, which currently base themselves upon the distillation of test shots, do not orientate themselves on conventional formulae for songs and are also correspondingly not a starting point for a relay of soloists: they are a stepping stone for general excursions and presume with all participants a distinctive sensorium for the merging of experimental forthrightness and structural conclusiveness. Roth and Reto Staub, the pianist, have already been developing for a good decade new melodies and forms of interaction. Roth made the bassist Martin Wyss a part of his band because he is extremely competent in playing the bow. Owing to his sophisticated combination of quiet and loud styles Michi Stulz is the ideal drummer for a band, which, in spite of a traditional form of line-up, forgoes the principle of "leader plus a rhythm section". Tom Gsteiger