Into the groove of a rhythm king

Nik Bärtsch has come up with an interesting new musical concept. He describes it as Zen-Funk, a pop fan might hear traces of trance - just don't call it jazz, writes Stuart Nicholson.

Zurich is Switzerland's commercial capital and The Kaufleuten its classiest rock club. Its foyer has a plush red carpet, tall mirrors and marble-top tables with massive vases of fresh cut flowers that suggests closing time here is not the fraught experience it can be in some clubs. I'm here to see Nik Bärtsch's Ronin perform compositions from his new album Stoa. Bärtsch has built quite a reputation in Switzerland's "New Minimal Scene" with music that's all about grooves.

He calls it "Zen-Funk," which the Swiss daily Der Bund describes as "a new path". The music is certainly different, although the means Bärtsch uses to achieve it are conventional enough - piano or electric piano, bass clarinet, bass, drums and percussion. But what he has come up with amounts to an interesting new musical concept. This is music that throbs with a pulsating dynamism that's almost hypnotic. The insistent rhythms make you think of trance, but when you get up close they can also suggest the minimalism of Steve Reich.

Yet woven into the rhythmic tapestry is startling imagery that grows from simple beginnings - opening with the left-of-field intro to Modul 36, Bärtsch's piano began with a repeated phrase over an insistent groove which gradually took on a trance-like quality that soon had the tightly packed crowd on the dancefloor moving in time to the rhythm.

Bärtsch knew just how long to build the tension, and before it reached breaking point, cued the band into a new section. With his head shaved like a Zen master, he has a flair for the dramatic. Inscrutably presiding over the interlocking rhythms and haunting melody lines, he carefully choreographed the lighting to match the moods of the music.

This was body music for the mind; while Kapsar Rast summoned up the spirit of funky New Orleans grooves, Sha's bass clarinet haloed everything in mysterious ambient soundwashes, allowing Bärtsch's less-is-more piano to create a unique form of forward momentum. It was a musical journey that swept you along through compositions with names such as Modul 38/17, Modul 32, and Modul 35 that were full of deft twists and turns. Before you knew it, 60 minutes of dizzying music detail had gone by with more puzzling allusions than Ezra Pound's Cantos.

It's music where a pop listener might hear elements of trance and ambient, a jazz fan grooves and tension and release, while a classical listener might hear the minimalism of a Steve Reich or an Avro Part. Yet these influences are an organic meshing of musical textures, a process Bärtsch describes by turning to the Japanese Marshal Arts (he is a black belt in Aikido).

"You can study Aikido if you are Swiss or Eskimo, but behind it there is a very culturally orientated aspect of Shintoism, very special, very Japanese. That does not mean you cannot use its principles, because they are universal, and I am looking for that in styles [ of music] - you must always check out what is universal in a style. If I listen to The Meters there are some principles in this groove music that you can work out and study."

Bärtsch is not from a musical family, but started out on drums at a very young age. He changed to piano when he became fascinated by boogie-woogie. "Back then it was not possible to study jazz in a music school, so my mother looked for a piano teacher who had an idea about jazz," he recalls. "He showed me a lot of boogie woogie, blues, and standards, and a lot of Chick Corea tunes, and the only classical tunes were Bartok, because they were connected to Chick Corea, and so I listened to a lot of music.

"When I was 16, when I started to work on classical piano, I had an old-school classical teacher, very serious, and then I decided to study music at university - classical piano. I think if you are a pianist interested in jazz this is a must - not just to play all the old stuff like a Bach sonata but also new stuff, complicated stuff. It is really important for a pianist to study that in a classical sense, that's a tradition also."

After receiving his diploma from the Zürich Musikhochschule, he went on to study philosophy, linguistics and musicology at the University of Zürich, moonlighting in a wide range of bands, "from fusion to free-funk and all kinds of extroverted jazz". At the same time his interest in modern composition was growing, in particular the work of John Cage, Morton Feldman and Steve Reich. With it his desire to play jazz evaporated. He began playing solo concerts, yet, feeling the need to play in clubs "with more power", he formed Ronin in 2001, which began as a trio with his longtime schoolfriend, Kasper Rast on drums and Björn Meyer on bass. What emerged was a very personal music that was based on formal compositions (classical music) that included the flexibility of improvised music (jazz), yet was underpinned by funky rhythms (James Brown, The Meters).

While "the groove" underpins each composition, Bärtsch builds up layers of competing rhythmic and melodic complexity that gives the music a hypnotic, or trance-like, feel. In 2003 he came to the attention of ECM record boss Manfred Eicher, who heard the band play at the Wasserkirche. A month later they met, and plans for an album were drawn up. The result is Stoa, but since Bärtsch believes the public associate jazz with, "swing, standards and a lot of soloing", which is about as far removed from his "Zen-Funk" as can be imagined, he says simply, "I don't use the term 'jazz' any more to describe my music."

He is not alone; many musicians are now discreetly dropping the "J" word. The significance is that it seems to have increased their appeal - they all sell plenty of records and have a large following beyond the usual jazz constituency. When the "J" word is removed, so is a whole range of preconceptions of what it may be. It allows audiences to find a way in to the music on their own terms and most actually find they like it, and go out and buy the albums and attend the concerts.

While this gulf between perception and reality, where jazz can be popular as long as it's not called jazz, is being successfully negotiated by musicians in the here and now, in the long term it does make you wonder whether these are the early signs that we are indeed moving beyond jazz into something else, if only as a matter of marketing convenience. If you're convinced you don't like jazz, then Nik Bärtsch's Stoa may well be for you.

Stoa by Nik Bärtsch's Ronin is released on the ECM label (987 3631)