Ostrakinda is a game of chance from ancient Greece, an ancestor of heads or tails representing day and night.

This trio of improvisers was born in 2019, drawing inspiration from the repetitive works of John Cage and the stripped-back melodies of Neil Young, to play an unpredictable game where, ultimately, rules are always meant to be broken just a little.

“Their permanent quest for new sonorities transforms their melodic lines by cultivating resonances, vibrations, and vast expanses, shaping a completely original sound through their diverted or augmented instruments.” Banlieues Bleues

“In the beginning was the forest.

Strings, stones, and skins are rubbed; the trumpet sometimes sounds like a horn from immemorial ages. The almost tribal groove that drives this trio always carries the melody, but at other times, it is the melody itself that, as if magnetized, draws in the formidable minimalism—steeped in the entire history of music—yielded by the bass and percussion. There is rustling; time is taken; ideas are developed; one settles in as if for a moment at a bivouac to share and sublimate the elements around oneself.

In ancient Greece, players of Ostrakinda chased one another—white team against black team, you are day, I am night—and roles could be reversed at the whim of a two-toned shell tossed at the edge of a line separating the two groups.

Here, the pursuit—the historical “chase” of jazz—does not pit instruments against each other but seeks the unexpected, provokes it. The writing seems simple, yet the forms of improvisation that escape from it take the liberty of summoning the most masterful playing techniques with a precious parsimony.

The sound of this trio is quite unique.

After listening, there remains in the ear something like the scent of wood and earth after the rain.”

Philippe Ochem, Jazzdor