Reviews

Georg Ruby’s music inhabits a place different from the other musicians under discussion. He always has one foot in the Jazz tradition while the other is way outside. He often prepares the piano, as on the two iterations of “Prison Song,” but he does so subtly, his rhetoric deep in the Blues while transforming it, often out of recognition. Along similar lines, there is his take on “Bye Bye Blackbird,” where fragments of the melody and its attendant rhythms gradually bloom to become sonorities related to but far removed from the standard, only later morphing into the tune as we recognize it. His group recording is similarly engaging, the compositions paying periodic homages to Monk’s unexpected twists and turns of phrase while always hanging just on the edges of accessibility; the playing of all involved follows suit. Ruby’s work encapsulates the Jazzhaus aesthetic, if one exists.
( Larry Hollis – Cadence Magazin, New York – 1/2/3/2010)

… and on the other hand the solo performance of piano player Georg Ruby from Cologne: according to “Jazz Classics By Today’s Improvisers” he takes up (often already defamiliarized) standards for his programme “From Ellington to Coleman”. He varies and takes them to pieces and improvises in such a subtle, imaginative manner keeping the spirit of the compositions alive yet opening new horizons. Ruby’s sensible and sensuous performance with a sonorous, swinging left and a rolling dynamic right hand - whose syncopic pounding reminds of the piano part of Wolfgang Riehm’s “Chiffre”-cycle - has become the first high point of the year.
(Michael Rieth/Frankfurter Rundschau)

Georg Ruby has rendered outstanding services to the German jazz scene in many ways - as co-founder of the Sadtgarten in Cologne, as manager of JazzHaus Musik and as conductor of junior big bands. It is sometimes unjustly overlooked that he furthermore belongs to the outstanding German jazz piano players. Ruby is especially convincing when it comes to the hardest test for the abilities of an improvising musician: the unaccompanied piano solo.
His concert on DLF, December, 12th in 2005, was amazing because of his powerful technique and great imaginative improvisation. Original compositions as well as standards as “Bye, bye, blackbird” or even The Mackeben’s movie soundtrack “Bei dir war es immer so schön” turned out to be sensitive masterpieces.
(Harald Rehmann/DLF)