Jesse Passenier, Fluid Orchestra & Dudok Quartet - Lit Scenes

Jesse Passenier is a Dutch composer, arranger, conductor, pianist and percussionist whose music builds bridges between jazz and classical styles. In his new album, Lit Scenes, he is joined by Fluid Orchestra and Dudok Quartet.

In 2012 Jesse Passenier started writing his first string quartet at the same time as working on the first movement of his Fantasy, and even though the idioms and overall styles of the two pieces were different, he came to realise that he wanted to connect them in one project. Fantasy was the composition that initiated the concept of Lit Scenes. Lit Scenes is a fascinating and irresistible combination of jazz, influenced by big-band composers such as Gil Evans, Bob Brookmeyer and Vince Mendoza, and classical, building on a long tradition of music for string quartet, but with particular links to the writing of Gyorgy Ligeti, Bela Bartok and Maurice Ravel. Joining the String Quartet No.1 and Fantasy on the album are the works Glided Sand, which represents the drowning of a friend, with the gilded sand being the beach on the other side, and Wild Waters, which is a unification of the languages in String Quartet No.1 and Fantasy.

By 2010, Jesse Passenier was 'Young Composer in Residence' at the MECC Jazz Festival in Maastricht, and in 2011 he was one of the four laureates of the International Composition Contest of the Brussels Jazz Orchestra. In the same year, he founded his own Broad Music Orchestra, predecessor of his current Fluid Orchestra. Jesse Passenier is the winner of the Rogier van Otterloo Award 2017, acknowledging his success in this process of bringing together musical genres.