Pianist and composer David Helbock is one of the leading Austrian musicians of younger generation. He won the most prestigious European piano competition in Montreux (2007, 2010), where he also received the award given by the audience. Along with his own material, he mastered an exceptionally successful jazz rendition of Prince’s musical opus. Just before the festival, his new, sixth album will be released, as his first recording for one of the most respected European labels – ACT Music & Vision from Germany. He will play at Belgrade Jazz Festival on October 27th, at Dom omladine Beograda (Belgrade Youth Center)
David Helbock: With this Album I wanted to dive into a mystic world. For me Mystic is always a search or path to your inner self – something that touches you inside on a mystical level. Music can do that but also mythology, stories from all over the world can do that – so that was also a big inspiration for the new Album. Old stories like persian legends told by Hafez, the Sufi poet from the 14th century, or old greek stories like the one about the old greek god „Eros“. All this together inspired me to write new music.
You had an opportunity to learn from the great jazz pianist Peter Madsen from 2000 to 2008 – what was the most important lesson you have learned from him? You became friends too, how important figure is he in your professional life?
David Helbock: I guess the lessons with him were very motivating. I first met him when I was around 16 and I brought my favorite Jazz CD into the lessons with him – and he had a personal story to most of the musicians on these CD, because he played with most of them. But we did not only talk about music, we talked about life, philosophy , why do we play music?, the music business and so on.
In your biography there is a line “Helbock is not only a great pianist, he is also a very individual thinker, who is investing not only a lot of dexterity but also quite an amount of brain activity to his projects”. Can you tell us something more about that, please?
David Helbock: Well that is something that some journalist wrote about me, so it´s strange for me to explain that. I guess that he meant, that I like to have a certain theme for a new CD or a new Project. I like to be inspired by all kinds of stuff, Books, Stories, Films, Emotions… – the last CD is about Mystic and Mythology, the one before was about Colors, I did one only dealing with numbers and so on…
One of your greatest achievements in your composing creativity is a book with over 600 pages of music called “Personal Realbook” from 2010, where you wrote one new piece every day for a whole year. How difficult was it to maintain a continuous inspiration for a so long project? How did you come up with the idea to do something of this kind?
David Helbock: This is an idea by the great Hermeto Pascoal who did this in 1998. I wanted to do the same and also I tried to not repeat myself to much – so for me this was just a big learning process, because after some moth I felt really empty and felt like I don’t have any ideas left and then a big search began where I tried all kinds of different composing techniques, inspired by people like John Cage, or graphic notation and so on.
In your career you have won many awards – which of them are you most proud of and why?
David Helbock: I´m not proud of these awards. They just help – you can write them into your CV and they help to get promoters of concerts getting interested. Still I think music is a very individual thing and you can not really compare it next to each other in a competition. Of course it´s nice when your work is noticed and acknowledged, especially if the jury who gives the award are really other musicians that I respect.
This year’s slogan of the Belgrade Jazz Festival is “Planet Jazz” – do you think that jazz around the world is the same, universal language of music, or are there differences? How do you see and feel jazz in 21st century?
David Helbock: Jazz is certainly not the same language everywhere. But music is. There are thousand forms of different Jazz but still if musicians come together from different countries – maybe the can not communicate through language, because they don´t speak the same language, but they can communicate through music on a much deeper level than language can every reach.
What do you know about Belgrade and Serbia? Are you familiar with some jazz (or other) musicians from our country?
David Helbock: Actually I don´t know too much about Serbian Music and I´m very interested in learning more, especially also about serbian folkmusic. Of course I know Dusko Goykovich or also in Vienna there quite a few serbian musicians like Vladimir Kostadinovic, who played at the Belgrade jazz festival last year.
What will you present to the audience of the Belgrade Jazz Festival, together with your Trio?
David Helbock: We will present our new Programm from our latest CD released on ACT Music this Fall – „Into the Mystic“.
