Hub Hildenbrand
A church. An agnostic framework. A ceremonial invocation of the void. A question. Doubt. Sonar signals into the unknown. Improvisation as a form of prayer. Epiphany.
For the guitarist and composer Hub Hildenbrand, music is essentially spiritual. It creates a space that eludes the faculties of the rational mind. This is particularly evident in improvisation. If you play alone, it is like having a dialogue with the void. You question, seek and listen attentively, like in a prayer.
To explore this space in a deeper way, that was what Hub wanted when he was drawn to the seclusion of a Uckermark country church to record his new album “MATER”. In five days, he created improvised meditations out of pure intuition over the idea of emptiness as a symbolic placeholder for the divine.
Although the recording is purely instrumental, Hub sees the individual tracks as a series of stories that are very personal and full of emotions for him. Loss, sadness, letting go, loneliness. “MATER” seeks the human on a deeper level without following a specific religious worldview. For the artist perhaps his most personal work to date.
Hub Hildenbrand studied at Rotterdam Conservatorium and at Berklee College of Music in Boston and was a student of Mick Goodrick and John Abercrombie, followed by studying at the Turkish Music Conservatory with the Ud master Nuri Karademirli and studying North Indian Classical Music in Calcutta with Sarod master Ranajit Sengupta. Hub has been the director of numerous ensembles of his own, he has composed film and theater music and has released eleven CDs of his own music.
His concerts took him far beyond Germany to the USA, India, Belgium, Cyprus, Greece, Russia, Denmark and the Netherlands, he played at numerous festivals such as the Delhi International Arts Festival, the Berlin-Istanbul Festival, folkBALTICA, the Bardentreffen Nuremberg, the Pafos Aphrodite Festival Cyprus and Jazz in July Crete and worked with internationally known musicians such as Palle Mikkelborg, Hein Van de Geyn, Nuri Karademirli, Rhys Chatham, Helen Davies, Carlos Bica, Zacharias Spyridakis, Ranajit Sengupta, Paul Brody, Levent Yildrim and Heinrich Köbberling. Hub is supported by the Goethe Institute and the Berlin Senate.