Torsten de Winkel - ProfilesArchive

About Me

NEW CD AVAILABLE NOW:
Torsten de Winkel presents
Bimbache Jazz & RaÃces - La CondiciÃ³n Humana
- endorsed by UNESCO
w/ Gregoire Maret, Gwilym Simcock, Hellmut Hattler, Kike Perdomo, Audun Waage, MarÃa MÃ©rida, Boris Kozlov, Fola Dada, Kai Eckhardt and many others
available at w w w . b i m b a c h e . i n f o
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IDIOT SAVANT & HUMAN CONDITIONER
Torsten de Winkel, guitar, e-sitar, perc, comp, prod (www.torstendewinkel.de); founder of new york jazz guerrilla artists-for-artists network and label (www.nyjg.org).

8 releases as leader featuring Michael Brecker, Joachim Kuehn, Nana Vasconcelos, Al Foster, Gregoire Maret, Larry Grenadier, Kai Eckhardt, Ernie Watts, Hellmut Hattler, Bob Moses, Buster Williams, Billy Cobham, Ravi Coltrane and others.
Recordings and/or live performances with Joe Zawinul, Grandmaster Flash, Whitney Houston, Udo Juergens, Steve Smith's Vital Information, Tom Coster, Tab Two, Terri Lyne Carrington, Simon Phillips, Randy Brecker, Gary Husband, Tony Lakatos, Abe Laboriel jr., Horacio 'El Negro' Hernandez, Julio Barreto, Matt Garrison and many others.

Guitarist / multi-instrumentalist on Pat Metheny Secret Story Group Tour.

Artist community activist, clinician ('Training Intuition - a more effective approach to jazz education and much more'), theorist on motivational psycholgy, observer of the human condition. Human OS analyst. Proponent of love and humor instead of judgment and rigidity ("Fear is the devil's real name"). Human Conditioner. Idiot Savant. Messiah-in-Training and megalomanic bastard with delusions of grandeur. Says: "don't take anything too seriously ever, unless you absolutely must...!!!"

Love and laugh.

And yes, we c a n improve the world, the human condition: be a force of reducing the pressure in the pressure cooker, allow the human animal to relax and its best intentions ("the better angels of our nature") to surface and roam rather then increasing the competition and self-perpetuating defense mechanisms which are at the root of the misery of the human condition...

Being HUMAN starts when we understand that we are puppets on the strings of our conditionings, of inner and outer stimuli, and choose to alter those conditionings which we determine are counterproductive, when we become observers of stimuli and choose which ones to react to and which not

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Krishnamurti / Ehama Institute / Antonio Damasio / Peter Kramer / Daniel Quinn / experiments on learned helplessness and serotonin in alpha primates / community is the greatest healing power

de Beauvoir - All men are mortal / Albert Speer - Erinnerungen/Memoirs / Shirer - The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich / Checkpoint Charlie - You are leaving the American sector

THE HUMAN CONDITION IS UNIVERSAL

My Interests

Music:

Member Since: 3/6/2006
Band Website: torstendewinkel.de
Band Members: CD LINER NOTES - method to the madness

theres a war going on. supposedly, its the keepers of the true faith in a world of decay, the G o o d , against those who feel the urgent need for improvement and change, the G o o d ...

but what it is really always about is our afflicted and struggling souls falling prey to our inherited instincts of survival in a world of evolutionary struggle for resources. for ages, this struggle has been about material resources. in a world which has become somewhat more civilized and affluent, we now compete for emotional resources, but perpetuating the misery of the human condition.

as artists, we believe that aesthetics should not be a means to exclude and polarize, but to include and inspire. in this spirit, the music on this album is performed by musicians hailing from as many different cultural as musical traditions in ever-varying constellations. the substance of the proven meets, mingles and toys with the urgency of the new, the yet illegitimate.

we hope that these recordings may not only be a document of our respective artistic developments, but also be understood as a wholehearted endorsement of the spirit of Martin Luther Kings memorable words:

"If we are to have peace on earth, our loyalties must transcend our race, our tribe, our class, and our nation; and this means we must develop a world perspecive. No individual can live alone, no nation can live alone, and as long as we try, the more we are going to have war in this world. We must either learn to live together as brothers or we are all going to perish together as fools."

with remarkably little effort, many entrenched divisions are being bridged here: young master musicians from all continents prove that, as the cliche has, there indeed is an international language, spoken by all who care enough to not mind the effort to seek what unites us rather than to indulge our competitive instincts, who understand that our mere humanity makes us all the same.

If we try to let our every action, our every thought be guided by love and not by fear, and if we dont give in to our reflexes to afflict others as the world has afflicted us, our reward shall be the soothing of our longing for a sense of purpose, knowing that we may leave the world a little better than we found it.

- torsten de winkel

Influences: Idiot Savants: ............................................................ ............................................................ .. "all roads lead... nowhere! but there are those you can walk with your heart." - Carlos Castaneda ............................................................ ............................................................ ....... "in show business, the most important thing is honesty. if you can fake t h a t, you've got it made!" - George Burns ............................................................ ............................................................ ....... "...to the feeling, a tragedy. to the thinking, a comedy" - Shakespeare ............................................................ ............................................................ ....... "...nothing more conservative than yesterday's avantgarde" - Torsten de Winkel ............................................................ ............................................................ ....... "...but this, too is but a breath of wind." - Cohelet / the Preacher / Ecclesiates
Sounds Like: not just another friendly neighborhood jam band
Record Label: new york jazz guerrilla / artist collective
Type of Label: Indie