Que Grande! “Seba – el alemán” wins the Cuban Grammy “Premio Cubadisco”

Sebastian Schunke was the first German artist to receive the Cuban Grammy Premio Cubadisco 2022 in the category “Premio Internacional” in Havana.

Schunke is particularly proud that his last production “Elusive Beauty” (Termidor Musikverlag/Connector Records) received an award, since it is his “most radical” album to date:

„”Hidden Beauty” – this is how “Elusive Beauty”, the title of Schunke’s new recording, could also be translated. It is the most radical album to date by the Berliner, who has been considered a visionary of Latin jazz since his debut CD “Symbiosis” in New York in 2000 alongside Antonio Sanchez and John Benitez. (…) What is happening here is the improbable symbiosis of supposed opposites. Something new emerges from the mathematical precision of advanced Latin jazz, the passion of Latin American folk culture and the European modern understanding of harmony that draws on Schönberg and Webern. To a certain extent a further development of the “Third Stream” movement founded by Gunther Schuller, which in Schunke’s “Fourth Stream” expands the mixture of jazz and classical music with a Latin component. On “Elusive Beauty” one perceives a fragile beauty, whose harmonious form is only made to shine in dark colors by the vibrations of a charmingly dissonant chord tone. And he witnesses the birth of his own sound and compositional language, which could become something like Ornette Coleman’s revolutionary music philosophy for the hard bop of the late 1950s, which had become rigid in formulaicity. In short: Sebastian Schunke does justice to his reputation as a bold innovator on his seventh album.“ (Josef Engels)