New York’s downtown meets the international Berlin jazz scene
New virtuosic, emotive, through-composed jazz for this all-star international band of Berlin-based musicians.
Ken Thomson, saxophone, keyboards, compositions (NYC-Berlin)
Mirna Bogdanović, vocals (Slovenia-Berlin)
Keisuke Matsuno, electric guitar (Berlin)
Simon Jermyn, electric bass (Ireland-Berlin)
Ivars Arutyunyan, drums (Latvia-Berlin)
Listen
From the forthcoming debut album:
Home and Away
Suspend
We Are What We Dream
Grey
The first piece I wrote for the band, about moving to Berlin during a pandemic and bouncing back and forth between my two homes, Brooklyn and Berlin.
This was one of these classic moments when I woke up in the middle of the night and wrote down the main thematic material of this one. Sometimes dreams approach reality and I wonder which is more real.
A suspension in music is when you have a note that holds a feeling of the previous section and then resolves into the new one. This song uses basic musical materials - basic scales, but with continuing suspensions and constantly shifting harmonies underneath .. kind of like our lives.
This is about Winter in Berlin.
Live
You Are A - live in Berlin
Lead with Love - live in Berlin
We Are What We Dream - live in Berlin
Lingua Franca
This new band of international, virtuosic Berlin-based musicians brought to life the detailed and breathless compositions by the New Yorker turned Berliner. Ken Thomson is the clarinetist with the NY-based contemporary music group Bang on a Can, who toured Europe throughout the early 2000s in the band Gutbucket and later released leader records with his bands Slow/Fast and Sextet, and has been featured in countless clubs and festivals as a leader including the Saalfelden Jazz Festival, Bimhuis, and more.
The musicians of this project are not only well-established bandleaders in their own right, but are the type of adventurous musicians to join Ken Thomson as they fall headfirst together into the journeys of the compositions. The expressive vocalist Mirna Bogdanović who joins Thomson in the frontline of the band has won the Deutscher Jazzpreis twice — for Debut Album of the Year in 2021 and Album of the Year in 2023. Keisuke Matsuno and Simon Jermyn are two of the most in-demand musicians in the city, both performing with musicians such as Jim Black, Charlotte Greve, John Zorn and many more — and whose feel, time, and expression are matched only by their compatibility as rhythm section teammates. Drummer Ivars Arutyunyan has a dual career in his native Latvia, performing with a vibrant scene and winning the “Composer of the Year” prize from National Cinema Award “Lielais Kristaps,” alongside his work in Berlin; he, too, has played across the world and performed with Seamus Blake, Wanja Slavin, and others.
Ken Thomson
“Ken Thomson’s music dances at the crossroads of contemporary classical and jazz—filled with boundless verve, blistering improvisations, and contrapuntal complexity. When he’s performing, his energy shines onstage—and when he’s writing music, it leaps off the page.”
– Maggie Molloy, Second Inversion
“Mr. Thomson’s compositions are intricately wrought and incident-steeped” – Nate Chinen, The New York Times
“There are lots of jazz artists who write complex music, but much of it lays flat and sounds stiff. Thomson’s pieces breathe and-emanate an infectious energy, with every wend and wind hurtling -the music forward rather than showing off the band’s chops, and every deceleration and pause recasting the sections of his multipartite works rather than winding up the next display of virtuosity. “ – Peter Margasak, Chicago Reader
“kraftvoll, komplex, abwechslungsreich, leidenschaftlich, unterhaltsam.” – JazzThing
“Er ist einfach ein Gipfelstürmer” – Hans-Jürgen Schaal, JazzThetik
Berlin and Brooklyn-based clarinetist-saxophonist-composer Ken Thomson is widely regarded for his ability to blend a rich variety of influences and styles into his own musical language while maintaining a voice unmistakably his own.
“Each project from the composer and multi-reed player Ken Thomson has been good news, whether he’s writing for chamber players or groups that bridge jazz improvisation and contemporary composition.” – The New York Times
He currently co-leads Anzû Quartet, an international ensemble dedicated to performing and commissioning for Olivier Messiaen’s “Quartet for the End of Time” instrumentation, who will be releasing two CDs in 2025-2026 on Cantaloupe Music, including adjust, featuring his three-part composition “Uneasy,” featured as the Top Contemporary Classical CDs in Bandcamp His new Berlin-based project, Lingua Franca, is a through-composed band jumping between improvisation, contemporary music and math-punk, featuring top musicians from the city; the group has toured Germany and its debut recording is coming soon.
His previous projects combining the sounds of jazz and contemporary music, Sextet and Slow/Fast, garnered Top of 2018 placement from websites Second Inversion and AnEarful and have toured Europe and the US, played the Saalfelden Jazz Festival and more; and were praised by The NY Times in a full review for their “intricate long-form compositions.” He has released heralded full-length CDs of his compositions in 2013 with JACK Quartet (Thaw) and 2016 with cellist Ashley Bathgate and pianist Karl Larson (Restless).
Besides his own groups, Ken plays clarinets for the Bang on a Can All-Stars, one of the world’s preeminent contemporary music ensembles. As a teaching artist, he is on faculty at the Bang on a Can Summer Music Festival and has given composition master classes to multiple universities across the globe, and taught as guest faculty at the Vermont College of Fine Arts Masters program and as a composer mentor at the Ensemble Offspring Hatched Academy in Sydney, Australia.
As a composer, he has been commissioned by the American Composers Orchestra, Bang on a Can, Lorelei Ensemble, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Vonk, the True/False Film Festival, Doug Perkins, Mariel Roberts, and others, and has received awards from New Music USA, Foundation for Contemporary Arts, ASCAP and the Aaron Copland Fund for Music. He is also a prolific arranger, with arrangements recorded by Meredith Monk (called “Top 25 Classical Tracks of 2020” by The New York Times) and David Byrne/St Vincent. He has recently arranged the entire album “1996” by Ryuichi Sakamoto for the Bang on a Can All-Stars.
Performing with the Bang on a Can All-Stars, he has appeared as a soloist with the LA Philharmonic, Danish Radio Symphony, Nashville Symphony, BBC and RTE Concert Orchestra, and more. As a clarinetist and saxophonist, he has performed and recorded with Ensemble Signal (conducted by Brad Lubman), working directly with Steve Reich, Helmut Lachenmann, Charles Wuorinen and others. He has collaborated with many new-composed music groups including Alarm Will Sound, International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE), Novus NY, Splinter Reeds, and more.
He has also worked as a music director, notably, directing composer Julia Wolfe’s “Traveling Music” at the Bordeaux Conservatory, France, 2009, and has conducted performances of “Music for Airports” with the Bang on a Can All-Stars, choir, and guest musicians from Melbourne to Buenos Aires.
From the late 90s until late 2010s, he played saxophone and was one of the 4 composers in the punk/chamber/jazz band Gutbucket, with whom he toured internationally to twenty countries and 32 states over twenty years. For ten years, he musically directed the Asphalt Orchestra, an 8-piece next-generation avant-garde street band who debuted in long runs at the Lincoln Center Out of Doors Festival.
He has recently been the subject of profile features in Downbeat, NewMusicBox and Critical Read. He is a F. Arthur Uebel Artist and D’Addario Woodwinds Artist.
Selected Discography
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