It is a pleasant experience to record an album. To turn one’s own compositions into music, to invite the right artists, to arrange and act as one pleases, in short: to be in charge of the musical direction and dramaturgy. In the best case, the result resembles an identity card, a musical ID.
However, despite the fact that nowadays almost every instrumentalist presents a solo-album eventually, not all consider this a top priority on their bucket list. This is particularly true for much in demand studio musicians who enjoy working on other people’s projects and to contributing their own creative input. Claus Fischer is one of those musicians. Then there are those who spend most of their professional life on the road, travelling from one tour to the next. Claus Fischer is also one of them. The question many asked him - “when will you release your own album?” - was never that important to himself. When at the service of others he could always make a difference by contributing his unique qualities and skills as one of the world’s best electric-bassists, full of power and a bastion of calm in the crazy mixture of funk, rock and fusion.
Then the pandemic came along. 2020 and 2021 should have been busy years for him, touring with Bill Evans, Larry Carlton, Wolfgang Haffner, Simon Oslender and Angelo Kelly, among others. Everything was cancelled. This called for improvisation and necessity is known to be the mother of invention. One can also make a virtue out of necessity…When faced with empty diaries such wisdoms have the quality of hackneyed calendar mottos. Undoubtedly, many musicians have made the “best” of a difficult situation, or at least tried hard within their means.
The most obvious move was probably to focus on writing music and to work on grooves and sounds in your own studio. Claus Fischer chose this option. At some point during this process, the question came up: Why not record a solo-album after all? If not now, when? The answer to these questions is the album Downland.
