As some of you may know, last year’s Best Club Performance section of the International Jazz in the Park Competition was won by Grey Paris, an evolving cinematic electro-acoustic trio based in Berlin. The jury was conquered by their process of making music stems from a semi surreal mental landscape which translates into music that is part melody and part social experiment.
Their prize consisted in a tour in Romania, which will take place in March this year. Here you can find out when and where the three members of the band will be performing. But before knowing the artists whose music instils a sentimental effect that moves the body physically live, let’s get to know them through a few essential words.
Yiorgos Parisis (piano/electronics) is a composer, piano and saxophone player from Greece, based in Berlin, Germany since 2014. He started learning the piano by the age of 8 with a local private piano teacher in his hometown Serres, and then, after joining the music high school of his town, he started learning the saxophone as well. During his engineering studies in Thessaloniki, he attended the National Conservatory for resuming his saxophone studies and the same time had the chance to form different music projects, varying from Greek traditional music to funk and jazz, performing mainly as a saxophone player. After moving to Berlin, Yiorgos re-discovered his passion for composition and the piano, starting composing and producing his first electro-acoustic tunes, which led to form Grey Paris, together with the Berlin-born drummer and music producer Arian Stechert. As a piano player, he has performed among others together with the electro-acoustic jazz band EOS, polyphonic group “Pleiades”, singer Vasileia Kontopoulou (Inner Sail) and singer Kasia Borek.
Arian Stechert (drums/sampling) is a Berlin-based musician and producer. At the age of 10, he started taking lessons in piano and also tought himself how to play guitar and drums. Since having his first band projects in the late 1990s, he got into audio engineering, recording and producing and so he completed a two year course at SAE Berlin in 2005/2006. Since then, he played in various projects with singers like Annika Hein (Anni K), Vincent Stefan (Quizkid), Dry Mention and many more. In 2008, he decided to take a course to become a piano technician, which led him to work as a freelancer in Berlin with his own restoring workshop. After meeting pianist Yiorgos Parisis for a piano evaluation and tuning, the two of them put their ideas and compositions together and formed the electro-acoustic project Grey Paris.
Last but not least, Mark Beumer (bass & synth) is member of Grey Paris since 2017. He has been a tour bass player in Europe and the USA for the past 10 years, including for Joy Askew NYC (Peter Gabriel), Misty Boyce LA (Sara Bareilles), Steve Waitt, Producer Chris Cubeta NYC and many others.
The three of them manage to bring their own personal touch on music and create something far different than much of the music you hear today. Immersive and captivating, the melodies build up like ocean waves and slowly but surely capture you as the shores under your feet begin to fade. So, whether you get to see them live in Cluj, Oradea, Timișoara or Bucharest, rest assured you won’t regret any minute of it.
