After eleven albums with a varying ensemble size, Martin Küchen’s Angles returns with The Death of Kalypso, its most ambitious statement to date: a jazz opera for our times. Joining forces with vocalist Elle-Kari and Angles pianist Alexander Zethson, who wrote the string arrangements and band notations, Küchen adds another volume to the band’s sizeable, yet coherent catalog, which merges infectious free jazz grooves with tumultuous emotional cadences that reflect both human and political concerns.

Musically, the project is rooted in Küchen’s urge to work with Sander and a string quartet. As is often the case recently, the pandemic – which Küchen refers to as “...that period when making music suddenly became this absurd, almost suspicious idea and polarization seemed to reach an all time-high” – provided the creative trigger. Starting with “Une certaine paix” (a special kind of peace) as a working title, Küchen provided Zethson with home-recorded demos, containing layers of saxophones, rhythmical ideas and, in some cases, the most basic ideas for the strings, recorded on a Casio-synth. Later, the band leader also sent both Zethson and Sander versions with vocals, to share his ideas about the relation between melodies and lyrics. 

The foundation for the opera was laid in 2021. Except for "A Campaign of Tragedy" (which was devised around a decade ago), all the songs were created around the conception of the work as a whole. This “jazz opera” that was to become The Death of Kalypso was already present in Küchen’s mind when writing these songs. Occasionally, his personal life also seeped in: "Kalypso in Karlsbad, Haunted by Dreams" came to him in the hot summer of 2021, with the memory of his father’s recent passing still raging in his head.