THE TRIO – Mainz/Frangenheim/Centazzo

THE TRIO / Saturday Morning Session
Studioboerne45 / Berlin / May 17 2025

THE TRIO – Mainz/Frangenheim/Centazzo

At the very last day of Andrea Centazzos Berlin-residency in may 2025, which had been filled with concerts and studio recordings with some of the finest improvising musicians of the Berlin scene, the LA-based Italian-American percussionist choose to record a final trio with improvising doublebassist Alexander Frangenheim and pianist Matthias Mainz. Mainz and Centazzo had been touring as a duo of percussion, piano and electronics the preceding year. For may 2025 Frangenheim had curated a series of three group performances/recordings with instrumentalists, electronic musicians and voice centered around the italien-american percussionist.

Mainz and Centazzo had already created a common ground of musical forms and aesthetics when they teamed up with Frangenheim. Centazzos hybrid percussion setup of eight framdrums, cymbals and MalletKAT with acoustic and sampled sounds seems to perfectly match Mainz´ percussive and often fragil sound actions on the prepared piano. Alexander Frangenheims virtuoso bass-playing from conventional plucking to a bowing technique evoking everything from rich overtones to harsh noises enables him immediate changes in improvising solistic, structural or sound movements and sets him in the middle of the two percussive and orchestral instrumentalists.

The musical flow evolving in their performances contains raw and rough elements as well as soft and fragile moments. The abundance of Free-Jazz-material alternates with minimalistic movements - THE TRIO is serious music and serious fun.

Matthias Mainz - Prepared and Unprepared Piano

Alexander Frangenheim - Doublebass

Andrea Centazzo - Framedrums, Cymbals, Samples, MalletKAT

Photocredits: Andrea CentazzoSunglasses/Matthias Mainz; Andrea Centazzo_Glasses/Matthias Mainz; Matthias Mainz_Grantpiano/David Neumann; Andrea Centazzo_Percussion/David Neumann; Matthias Mainz_Keyboard/Nikolaus Neuser; Alexander Frangenheim/Cristina Marx /Photomusix

Mainz/Frangenheim/Centazzo

Matthias Mainz is a transdisciplinary musician, curating artist and author. Since 2000, Mainz has been working in alternating cycles of three to five years on the penetration of political contemporary themes in montages of materials and methods from performative and visual art forms in ever new genres and milieus with musical-multistylistic concepts between improvisation and composition in jazz, new, and electronic music and contexts ranging from transmedia environment performances, to works with theater and dance theater, to conceptual and curatorial contexts of transcultural and new music. His musical foundation as a conceptual improvising musician proves to be a unifying, continuous motif, in which the rawness and directness of noise, electronics and free jazz are combined with the delicacy of the softest noises and stylistic ties back to late-romantic free tonality in a paradoxically interconnected state of constant improvisational openness. 



Alexander Frangenheim is a trained classical bass player and has worked as an improvisor since the late 1980ies. He was a key figure in the field of collaboration with dance for about a decade, working with such artists as Julyen Hamilton or Nigel Charnock. In 1992 he founded his label „concepts of doing“ for festivals, events and as a CD label. Frangenheim was member of the ensemble Zeitkratzer and Günter Christmann’s „Vario-34“ including Mats Gustafsson, Paul Lovens and Thomas Lehn. He has composed the music for the experimental film „EZB 2011-2012“, nominated for the German Film Award 2015. Since 2009 he is running in Berlin studioboerne45 for contemporary advanced music. Lately he catched up on his playing with Conny Bauer, played trio with Aki Takase and Steve Heather, was guest musician in King Übü Orchestrü and part of the quartet Zerang/Agnel/Crossland/AF. In 2022/23/24 he was touring with NAIL (AF + Michel Doneda and Roger Turner).

Andrea Centazzo collaborated with the who's who of the European and American avant-garde of creative jazz and improvised music since the 1970s and has been releasing under his own label Ictus since 1976. Centazzo plays on a self-developed setup of tuned frame drums, gongs and cymbals and his playing combines influences from free jazz and minimal music. His use of sample triggers over the bass frame drums is reminiscent of the musical postmodernism of the late eighties. Centazzo has improvised with musicians such as Evan Parker, John Zorn, Derek Bailey, Steve Lacy, Don Cherry, Lester Bowie, Albert Mangelsdorf and Ernst-Ludwig Petrowski. Between 1979 and 1986, he brought together the European improvisational avant-garde with Gianluigi Trovesi, Theo Jörgensmann, Franz Koglmann, Carlos Zingaro and Mark Dresser, among others, in the Mitteleuropa Orchestra. As a composer influenced by minimal music, Centazzo has composed music-theatrical works and has been working on concepts of sound and video since the early 1980s.