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Hartmut Hillmann |
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hand-made, hand-selected music products
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Strings:
R.Cocco stainless steel custom XL : 35-44-62-85-106-128.
New Hartmut Hillmann Band CD “Point of View” out in March 2011:
Since summer 2008 Hartmut Hillmann has been leading his own project again: The Hartmut Hillmann Band featuring some of the finest musicians around: Joe Hain on keyboards, percussionist Klaus “Nirjan” Frölich and Indian/Tamil percussionist Nagaswaran “Warren” Wunderlich. The band’s mix of natural instruments with extensive use of loops and electronics results in some enigmatic Heavy-Urban-Ethno-Funk-Crossover-Hiphop-Dinner-Music.
The Hartmut Hillmann Band is the house band of the Frankfurt, Germany based Japanese Izakaya Club/Restaurant Mangetsu (full moon) and can be heard at their monthly Full Moon Party. That’s the place where everything started; since the location is very small the volume had to be kept at a moderate level. Hartmut invited two percussion players instead of a drummer and started to use loops, samples and drum programming as a new musical concept.
The song structures were improvised mostly and here and there some themes and melodies evolved from gig to gig. The musicians took their time, without the pressure to make a statement within five minutes. Thus, many songs continue about twenty to thirty minutes with a magical, trance-like atmosphere.
The essence of thirteen months of recording three hour concerts can be heard on the debut album “Point of View” released in March 2011.
R. Cocco Strings, or coming home from a string odyssey:
Hartmut met Alfonso Anecchiarico, the owner of the R.Cocco company, during the Frankfurt Musikmesse in 2008. An intimate conversation with Alfonso gave him a deep insight in his philosophy of string making and life in general and convinced him to order a test set of custom strings for both his fretted and fretless Fodera six string basses. He was overwhelmed by the sound quality and the feel of the handmade round wound string he had been searching for years without luck:
“I had two problems, the Foderas have a 36” (extra long) scale and I prefer a .035 C-String which were not available in Germany. I always had to search for single strings, and even the big brands had so called “XL-strings” which were too short. Believe me, I was crazy for someone to make those strings for me, and when I played them for the first time, it was like a curtain removed from my eyes, ahem - ears! They give me the funk for slapping and the lion’s roar for my fretless tone. And they last twice as long as other brands, it’s incredible!”
My R.Cocco strings are stainless steel custom XL : 35-44-62-85-106-128
Hartmut Hillmann bio:
Hartmut Hillmann is one of the most prolific German six string bass guitar players in more than twenty-five years. Inspired by Anthony Jackson, he adapted the styles of Jaco Pastorius and Marcus Miller for the six stringed fretted and fretless bass. Besides his incredible ability to groove and to play supportively, he is an ethnomusicologist having studied intensively African and Indian rhythms.
Hartmut left the odd-meter Funk band “Zabriskie Point“ after six years in 1997, and started to focus on his solo career with his project “Illicit Poetry“. The results were two CDs: “Eclectic Jazz“ and “Uncivilized“. Though enthusiastically acclaimed by many critics, there was not the major record deal Hartmut had dreamed of, and he retired in frustration from the music biz in 2002. He started teaching children with special needs jazz and improvisation as a therapeutical means, exploring his Buddhist practice and playing drums in his German-Japanese Band “Ushi-Tora“ for five years.
He jumped back to the scene in 2007 joining several bands and projects as bass player: Dgroove, Wasserspiele, Mike Burn And Friends, Scottish singer Kate Cassidy, touring with fellow bass player Kai Eckhardt and doing some solo concerts.
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