Blind Date

Blind Date Quartet

2012, GPE Records

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Angelika Sheriden  flutes
Ulrike Stortz  violin
Scott Roller  cello
John Hollenbeck  percussion

Blind Date Quartet is a brilliant new free-improvising quartet made up of Angelika Sheridan, Ulrike Stortz, Scott Roller and John Hollenbeck, all musicians who have been active as soloists, composers, and ensemble players in a wide variety of renowned formations spanning the entire spectrum of musical styles and non-styles ranging from classical and contemporary chamber music through myriad variants of jazz on to world music and everything in-between and beyond. Their interactions are characterized by breathtaking reactions, startling combinations and simultaneities, instantaneous changes of material and textures, all in a context of concentrated and unified development, spinning out complex and very convincing musical forms.

The name of the group derived from the first encounter of the ensemble for a concert in Berlin for the “Klangbildung” festival at the Exploratorium in May 2009, where Scott Roller (playing the “matchmaker”) brought the other three musicians (with whom he had already performed in various contexts) together for the very first time shortly before the concert. The enthusiastic reception of that first concert was so overwhelming and the musicians’ joy at this new formation so profound that further concerts and recordings seemed inevitable. Blind Date also underlines (in a tongue-in-cheek sort of way) the spontaneous and surprising nature of the collective compositions created by the quartet.