The Gratkowski-Zoubek-Landfermann-Mahnig quartet was founded in 2016 and has been playing freely improvised music ever since. Their CD “Torbid Daylight” was released in 2020. Peter Margasek described the band as offering “elevated listening, quicksilver reaction, and a touch of telepathy.” No wonder: the musicians are four highly experienced band leaders and fantastic instrumentalists. Frank Gratkowski now lives in Berlin, while the other musicians continue to be driving forces on the Cologne scene, active in both free improvisation and contemporary music.

Now playing under the name “In Cahoots,” the group performs compositions by Frank Gratkowski (the Südwestrundfunk Jazz Award winner has released around 50 CDs under his own name (SWR) has released around 50 CDs to date, and after his work “Mature Hybrid Talking” for and with the Ensemble Modern in 2022, he also collaborated with the Ensemble Musikfabrik in 2023) and is regularly expanded into a quintet by the wonderful saxophonist Ingrid Laubrock (also a winner of the SWR Jazz Prize), who lives in NYC. “Beneath the subatomic particle level, there are fibers that vibrate at different intensities. Different frequencies. Like violin strings. The physicists say that the particles we are able to see are the notes of the strings vibrating beneath them. If string theory is correct, then music is not only the way our brains work, as the neuroscientists have shown, but also, it is what we are made of, what everything is made of. These are the stakes musicians are playing for.“ (T Bone Burnett). The quintet made its debut in Darmstadt in 2023, and ”In Cahoots" can now be experienced live for the first time in Vienna at P&B. (Press release)