Nik Bartsch at Le Poisson Rouge

Nik Baertsch's RONIN is commemorating their tenth year with a special tour and the release of a new live album. They've compiled tracks from international tours throughout Europe, the United States and Japan. Aside from their studio work, Ronin stands out as a live band: the shows in Poisson Rouge in New York City and London Jazz Festival ranked among Björk, Patti Smith, Feist, Radiohead, and Anna Calvia on the Wallstreet Journal and AllAboutJazz's lists of the best concerts of 2011.

RONIN's extraordinary stage presence is partly indebted to the group's monday night concert series, which has taken place weekly in Zurich without interruption since 2004. In these legendary sessions, RONIN fine tunes bandleader Nik Baertsch's compositions while enlivening them with an ever-developing interpretation. In the Montags series integral aspects of the live organism RONIN are thoroughly trained: phrasing, instrumentation, sound, light, and dramaturgy. ...

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Nik Baertsch's RONIN is commemorating their tenth year with a special tour and the release of a new live album. They've compiled tracks from international tours throughout Europe, the United States and Japan. Aside from their studio work, Ronin stands out as a live band: the shows in Poisson Rouge in New York City and London Jazz Festival ranked among Björk, Patti Smith, Feist, Radiohead, and Anna Calvia on the Wallstreet Journal and AllAboutJazz's lists of the best concerts of 2011.

RONIN's extraordinary stage presence is partly indebted to the group's monday night concert series, which has taken place weekly in Zurich without interruption since 2004. In these legendary sessions, RONIN fine tunes bandleader Nik Baertsch's compositions while enlivening them with an ever-developing interpretation. In the Montags series integral aspects of the live organism RONIN are thoroughly trained: phrasing, instrumentation, sound, light, and dramaturgy.

And so the circle is successfully squared: You hear a band so precisely in tune with each other, working together like Swiss clockwork, simultaneously exuding an air of coolness, agility, and euphoria-- as if the notes were being conceived in realtime. The band achieves in a live setting the qualities already cultivated on their albums; intelligent beats and funky rhythms are combined with meditative and stoic layerings of patterns, resulting in a dramaturgically compelling concert experience that “is worth recommending to everyone: from music theorists, to the tea-ceremonialists, to the dance-enthusiasts. (Süddeutsche Zeitung).”

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