Pascal Niggenkemper’s Ensemble Tuvalu – d’une rive à l’autre

Pascal Niggenkemper is a German-French, Strasbourg-based double bass player and composer who creates music that blurs the distinction between free improvised music, pure sound, and experimental music with a highly personal musical language infused with extended double bass techniques. His nine-musician Ensemble Tuvalu is titled after the South Pacific, Polynesian archipelagic nation of Tuvalu, threatened by climate change and the rising sea level that may risk its very existence in the coming decades.

Niggenkemper’s d’une rive à l’autre (from one shore to the other) was commissioned by the SWR Kultur for the SWR NEWJazz Meeting 2024. This composition reflects on the human relationship with nature, using texts and poems in the native languages of the Ensemble Tuvalu musicians – French trumpeter Louis Laurain, American cornet