Over het album

As on his debut album Purification, the universe of Tryon is almost limitless on his second album Freaky Squash Baby. Among the influences of the American bassist Kellen Tryon Mills, who leads the band and composed all the pieces, are Stravinsky, Ligeti, Bartok and Schönberg, but also Frank Zappa – and there is also the outlandish late work “Civilization Phaze III”, which even die-hard Zappa fans often dislike. However, it is the early seventies incarnation of the Mothers of Invention that Tryon often sounds like, and the Ruth Underwood of today is called Taiko Saito; the Japanese marimba virtuoso has just received the Berlin Jazz Prize and shapes the Tryon sound just as Underwood shaped that of the Mothers. You could imagine further  parallels; accordantly. the pianist Rieko Okuda is George Duke reborn, but we do not want only to insist on the Zappa influence. Freaky Squash Baby is simply too diverse for that. Mills, who has been living in Berlin for years, met musicians there who can not only implement his highly complex music, but also fill it with life. These include the singers Kiki Manders, Mirna Bogdanovic and Erik Leuthäuser, the saxophonists Grgur Savic, Philipp Gropper and Dovydas Stalmokas, the guitarist Jasper Stadhouders, the bassist Antti Virtaranta and the drummers Martial Frenzel and Oli Steidle. In addition, there are guests such as the clarinetist Edith Steyer, the flutist Tilmann Dehnhard and the alto saxophonist Karen Ng. “The music is just very complex,” Mills sighed, “so I thought it would be better if two musicians shared the drumming job. And indeed, it was a challenge for Martial and Oli to get the stuff done, but of course they got it done; after all, they are excellent improvisers.“ Mills composed and recorded the eight songs in just three months. Kiki Manders sings the lead vocals this time, while Erik and Mirna mainly sing background vocals. “I wanted to have a female voice on this album that carries the songs,” Mills explained. The title song refers to a science fiction story about the cross-breeding of people and vegetables.  “Call Any Vegetable” by a certain Frank Zappa comes to mind. “The Foot” is about a drug addict (you think of Zappa's “Stinkfoot”)  and “Little Dicktators” speculates about the fact that political tyrants who wage war often have a small penis; you involuntarily recall Zappa’s albums like Joe's Garage or The Man from Utopia. “I grew up with prog rock,” Mills grinned. “A lot of jazz musicians today don't know that stuff. They make music like Gentle Giant, and when I point it out to them, they ask: Gentle Who?“ With breakneck tempo changes, the ride through a galaxy of harmonies and texts that convey political concerns: “Soup is Healing” is also about addiction, psychological problems and how we deal with them, which make listening to Tryon a great pleasure, during which you should definitely leave your head tuned in. “There are so many great musicians in Berlin who have crossover potential and can play my stuff,” Mills stated happily, who once achieved fame and glory in the prog rock band Alex's Hand. “But most are satisfied with staying in their improvised neighborhoods. For example, musicians from Berlin-Mitte or Prenzlauer Berg can hardly ever be found at concerts that take place in Oberschöneweide. The way to 'Jazz am Kaisersteg‘ is simply too far for many. I find that quite irritating to say the least.” Like the Berlin jazz musician himself, Freaky Squash Baby gathers the cosmopolitans who want to take risks and conquer new worlds.