CUANTUNE

The nu jazz project Cuantune was born in the spring of 2010 at the initiative of two talented musicians with totally different personalities, Cruxfader and Elizabeth. These differences were actually the elements that brought them together and marked their musical compositions. During their live shows Cuantune is playing in an extended formula, working together with experimented musicians like Toma Dimitriu (piano/keyboards), Michael Acker (bass guitar, contra-bass), Andreas Aron (contra-bass) or Matt Smith (drums).

Elizabeth, one of the best Romanian jazz singer of the new generation, comes from a family of musicians her father being an accordion player and his grandfather a virtuoso on saxophone. After taking her first piano lessons at the age of 7, Elizabeth began studying intensively classical canto. Her love for jazz convinced Elizabeth to devote herself to this musical genre and so she started to study vocal jazz at one of Romania’s top musical high schools.

Cruxfader, fascinated by the hip-hop beats, began his musical journey at the age of 13 when he started to write his first tracks. Behind his laptop, turntables, sound mixer and keyboards, Cruxfader became a self taught musician by experimenting with rhythms and sounds through various collaborations with artists form the hip-hop and soul underground scene both from Romania and Ireland where he lived for five years.

The two of them met totally unexpected at a friends party where Cruxfader was deeply impressed by Elizabeth’s voice in the moment when she started a jam session of jazz improvisations with some of her friends. Developing a common interest for music, especially for jazz music, Cruxfader and Elizabeth decided to work together and so the two of them recorded their first track “I’ve seen you”, song that expresses the best their first encounter.
“I’ve seen you” was soon picked up by the main alternative radio stations in Romania, where it got air-played on their charts for more than 3 month, encouraging them to work together as a new formed band.

The music of Cuantune represents the natural condition of sounds that are in a constant evolution and that can suddenly stop and materialize for a short period of time in a new musical composition. The band’s name, composed of two words, “cuantum” (Romanian for quantum) and “tune”, describes best their vision on music. For Cruxfader, music represents an infinite quantum of sounds and different ways of combining them while for Elizabeth, the rhythm and the harmony are the ones that give the tone to a new piece of music. It’s quite hard to assimilate Cuantune’s style to a solely musical genre. Cuantune has it’s roots in the 40’s jazz bringing that idealistic atmosphere to the present time through a fusion of musical elements borrowed from soul, funk, electro, DnB or hip-hop surprising the audience with it’s freshness, cleverness and boldness.