Bill Laurance & Michael League

In the organizer's words:

"Pushing forward with a joint project is also an affirmation of ourselves. We are very close friends and this album is a celebration of that." - Bill Laurance

Some duos are put together specially. Others come about on their own. Like that of pianist Bill Laurance and bassist and oud player Michael League. The two have known each other since their student days. One of them once came to Denton from London to the University of North Texas to open his horizons in other directions. The other had originally learned guitar in his native California, but then picked up the bass and also traveled to Texas to experience a flow that was new to him. The two quickly got to know and appreciate each other and gathered like-minded people around them. Anything that was fun was allowed: classical, soul, folk, jazz. It was the founding phase of a collective that would become known as Snarky Puppy from 2003 onwards and would travel the world in a big tour.

The joint duo of Bill Laurance and Michael League and their album Keeping Company are something of an alternative to the large-scale Snarky Puppy format. Instead of energy and extraversion, the focus here is on a shared inner perspective. You can tell by the choice of instruments. Bill Laurance leaves the keyboards in the case and concentrates entirely on the piano, acoustic in sound and at best a little mechanically prepared. Michael League chooses a fretless bass guitar and the oud, an extreme contrast to the pure groove full of legato and rubato options with a transparently sparse but atmospherically rich sound effect. And they do without the band. This creates a special freedom for both participants. "The oud in itself has a very specific associative space," says Bill Laurance from the orchestral perspective of the piano. "When I compose, I always want to take the audience into other spaces. That works with the sound of the oud. It's not a guitar, it has something exotic about it. It's a canvas on which you can paint a lot of things. Even on the first album, we discussed a lot whether Michael should play a fretless nylon string guitar. He tried it out, but it didn't produce the same melodies as the oud. The sound and playing without frets certainly makes other musical information possible. That fascinated us."

And their curiosity has not waned so far. Keeping Company is the duo's second album after the internationally acclaimed Where You Wish You Were, which was released in January 2023. The preparation phase was extremely productive. Both participants wrote many sketches and compositions, with Bill Laurance alone writing up to three pieces a day for weeks on end. In the end, the abundance had to be compressed and brought into a form in which the music resonated: "The first album was more about establishing a sound and exploring the dynamics. Now we want to delve deeper. There's even more personality in the music. We also wanted to try out things we hadn't explored before, a touch of soul jazz, for example. And music played by just the two of us, without overdubbing. We found a lot of beauty in concentrating on the pure, the organic."

This is also due to the fact that both musicians allow excursions into the unknown. Michael League, for example, has never studied the traditional way of playing the oud. He originally learned the instrument from his brother, who studied it in Greece in the early 2000s. Later, Ara Dinkjian, one of the world's most respected masters of the instrument, became Michael League's mentor. He was also the one who repeatedly encouraged him to explore the oud from his own intuitive perspective. Bill Laurance, on the other hand, dispenses with the expansive sound of the piano for his duo playing. He prefers cantabile melodies, rhythmically concise, clear accompaniments and compact improvisations. The pieces themselves seem like miniatures, reduced to their core, each a small world of its own.
Keeping Company is a snapshot of an unusual team, a program like a collection of sounding Polaroids. Bill Laurance and Michael League are still in the wonderfully inspiring phase of joint exploration. Everything is open. The music sounds spontaneous and intuitive. It has the power of the personal and builds on a friendship that can also tolerate humor in its motivic entwining. Perhaps one day other players will join in. So far, however, dialog in a musically intimate setting has been the ideal form of artistic conversation for Bill Laurance and Michael League.

After playing an acclaimed concert in the Small Hall of the Laeiszhalle this year, Bill Laurance and Michael League are now coming to the Small Hall of the Elbphilharmonie with their new album on March 15, 2025.