Torsten de Winkel

At the age of 10, de Winkel picked up the Charango in La Paz, Bolivia where his father worked for the UN. He proceeded to teach himself guitar and jazz improvisation and attended the Hoch Conservatory in Frankfurt, Germany for a brief period.

For the release of Mastertouch, he collaborated with Michael Brecker, Billy Cobham, Kai Eckhardt, Ernie Watts, Alphonse Mouzon, Hellmut Hattler, Joachim Kühn and various other instrumentalists, setting a new standard for young musicians both in regard to its open minded eclecticism and its high level of transatlantic musical cooperation,[1] subsequently followed by many younger artists such as trumpeter Till Brönner.[2]

Upon an invitation by Steve Smith and Tom Coster, members of platinum-selling groups Santana and Journey, de Winkel become successor to Mike Stern and Frank Gambale in their co-led jazz-fusion group Vital Information and proceeded to tour internationally with this group. He accepted a full scholarship from the Berklee College of Music in Boston and graduated summa cum laude. In the 1990s, he collaborated with an unusually broad spectrum of artists including Pat Metheny (DVD Secret Story Live), Al Foster, Larry Grenadier, Matthew Garrison, Ravi Coltrane, Joe Zawinul, Grandmaster Flash, and more recently Gwilym Simcock and Stuart Hamm. He can also be heard on all ten CDs of the German vanguard electronica-jazz fusion duo Tab Two and continues to tour and record with Hattler, the group of former Kraan head Hellmut Hattler. This group won the Echo Award, the German equivalent of the Grammy Award, for best jazz album in 2001. Since, he has been active in various projects in Europe, Africa and Asia as well as in non-profit organizations exploring sustainability and globalization issues in the context of the arts.

Disenchanted with the common chord scale theory didactics, de Winkel has developed an alternative approach to teaching improvisation. Under the title Training Intuition this approach considers recent developments in learning psychology and in the neurosciences. De Winkel has conducted courses, master classes and clinics at various institutions, among them the Musikhochschule Hamburg and the Berufsfachschule für Musik in Krumbach/Schwaben. De Winkel is also active in the field of neurophilosophy.

In 2005, Torsten de Winkel was one of the initiators and has since been the artistic director of the Bimbache openART Festival and Initiative in UNESCO world biosphere reserve El Hierro (Spain). This project, based on a global interdisciplinary network of artists and thinkers, is an ambitious and non-profit effort at creating a platform which seeks to bridge traditional divides, both on a musical and human level, in a globalized world.

• Martin Kunzler: Jazz Lexikon. Rowohlt, Reinbek bei Hamburg 2002.

• Official website