| Jazz, Prog' Rock |
Summary: Rokost, led by Michel Schroeder, fuses 70s-inspired jazz-rock with modern electronic sounds, bridging the spirit of Yes and contemporary European club culture into a bold, evolving musical vision.
Rokost Redefines Jazz-Rock Fusion: Michel Schroeder Bridges 70s Prog and Modern Electro
Rokost does not simply revive the spirit of 1970s jazz-rock, it reconfigures it for a fractured, electronically saturated age. At first listen, echoes of Yes surface almost instinctively: the sweeping sense of structure, the interplay between virtuosity and atmosphere, the latent ambition to stretch genre boundaries. But where Yes once expanded the vocabulary of progressive rock from within, Rokost approaches that same legacy from the outside, refracting it through a distinctly contemporary, and unmistakably European, lens.
At the center of the project stands Michel Schroeder, a Hamburg-born trumpeter whose trajectory diverges sharply from the British lineage often associated with this sound world. Schroeder’s work with Rokost does not attempt to replicate or nostalgically revive the past. Instead, it engages in a restless reworking of inherited traditions, absorbing rock, pop, and jazz not as fixed idioms but as raw material. The result is music that feels at once deliberate and fluid: harmonically clear yet never simplistic, melodically focused without becoming predictable, rhythmically direct but constantly shifting beneath the surface.
Each composition begins with Schroeder, yet authorship quickly dissolves into collective transformation. In rehearsal, the ensemble dismantles and reconstructs his written material through improvisation, allowing the pieces to evolve organically. Structures stretch, collapse, and reassemble; motifs are reframed; grooves intensify or fragment. “We almost never play a piece exactly as I wrote it,” Schroeder notes. “That’s what gives it vitality, it becomes a shared work.” What emerges is not a fixed repertoire but a living body of music, shaped as much by interaction as by intention.
The sonic architecture of the album is grounded in an ever-present rhythmic drive, drumming that recalls the propulsion of 1970s pop and rock, yet filtered through a tighter, more contemporary sensibility. Beats lock into hypnotic cycles before subtly destabilizing, shifting accents or opening space for improvisational rupture. Above this, layers of synthesizers evoke the golden age of analog sound, with textures that unmistakably echo the tonal palette of the Minimoog and the expansive style of Rick Wakeman. But this is less homage than temporal resonance: a sound not reproduced, but reimagined.
Schroeder’s trumpet threads through this landscape with striking versatility, at times bright and declarative, cutting cleanly through dense arrangements; at others, processed or muted, dissolving into the electronic fabric. The instrument shifts roles fluidly, from melodic anchor to textural element, often blurring the boundary between acoustic presence and digital manipulation. Around it, the ensemble navigates a space where groove and abstraction coexist, where tightly constructed passages give way to moments of volatility.
This interplay unfolds within an electro-jazz hybrid that resists easy categorization. The music moves between the physical immediacy of club culture and the structural rigor of composed jazz, creating a tension that is as much aesthetic as it is cultural. One hears not just influences, but collisions: between dancefloor energy and concert-hall attentiveness, between repetition and rupture, between accessibility and complexity.
In this sense, Rokost feels profoundly shaped by a European musical ecosystem, one rooted in conservatory training, sustained by public funding structures, and defined by a long-standing openness to cross-border and cross-genre experimentation. This context fosters a particular kind of artistic approach: one that treats genre less as identity and more as a field of inquiry. Rokost embodies this sensibility, engaging with traditions it did not originate and reshaping them into something distinctly its own. Music history becomes not a lineage to preserve, but a material to be reworked, distilled, and recontextualized.
Schroeder’s own background underscores this trajectory. Previously recognized for his work in acoustic ensembles and large-scale jazz projects, he has built a reputation as a composer for big bands and crossover formats. Honors such as the Werner Burkhardt Music Prize (2026), the Lübeck Jazz Award (2018), and the Schleswig-Holstein Jazz Promotion Award (2021) mark him as a figure firmly established within contemporary European jazz. Yet Rokost signals a deliberate shift: a move away from purely acoustic frameworks toward a sound world driven by groove, amplification, and electronic production.
The album itself stands as a synthesis of these experiences, but also as a departure from them. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the keyboard work, where the influence of Wakeman lingers not as imitation but as a kind of echo across time, a reminder of how certain sonic ideas continue to reverberate across decades, reappearing in altered forms.
Rokost does not fuse genres for novelty’s sake. Instead, it builds bridges, between jazz audiences and listeners of electronic music, between composed architecture and spontaneous risk, between analog warmth and digital precision. The result is music that feels immediate and physical, often driven by insistent grooves and tactile textures, yet layered with intricate details that reward close listening. It can be abrasive without losing clarity, dense without becoming opaque.
At moments, the music evokes the sensation of a live set unfolding in a dimly lit club: bass frequencies pressing against the body, rhythmic patterns looping into trance-like states, fragments of melody emerging and dissolving in real time. At others, it recalls the deliberateness of a composed suite, each section carefully balanced, each transition intentional. This oscillation between environments, club and concert hall, spontaneity and structure, defines the album’s core tension.
Beneath its formal and sonic ambitions lies a more implicit resonance. Rokost’s music reflects a generation navigating an increasingly unsettled Europe, where cultural identity, economic stability, and political cohesion feel less certain than before. Without becoming programmatic, the album carries an undercurrent of unease, an energy that oscillates between urgency and introspection. It can sound like a release, a confrontation, or at times a quiet form of resistance.
In this light, the presence of electronic elements feels less like a stylistic choice than an inevitability. The textures of contemporary life, fragmented, accelerated, mediated through technology, find their counterpart in the music’s layered surfaces and shifting forms. Rokost mirrors a world in flux, one in which direction is uncertain and resolution remains elusive.
If there is a threshold being crossed here, it is not merely aesthetic. The electronic realm, with its own codes, infrastructures, and cultural figures, has begun not just to intersect with European jazz, but to reshape it from within. Rokost stands at that intersection, neither fully of one world nor the other, but actively negotiating the space between them.
Whether the group represents an emerging movement or remains a singular voice is, for now, an open question. What seems clear, however, is that the boundaries separating club culture and compositional rigor, improvisation and production, past and present, are dissolving with increasing. In Rokost’s hands, that dissolution becomes not a loss of identity, but the condition for something new to emerge.
Thierry De Clemensat
Member at Jazz Journalists Association
USA correspondent for Paris-Move and ABS magazine
Editor in chief – Bayou Blue Radio, Bayou Blue News
PARIS-MOVE, April 12th 2026
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Musicians :
Michel Schroeder | trumpet & FX
Marta Winnitzki | synthesizers
Leon Saleh | drums
Christian Müller | electric bass
Track Listing:
Lambo No. 5
Menschenfeind
Trotz
Jazon Hunter Strikes Again!
Meloda
Attitude Adjustment
We Will Still Be Here Tomorrow
Lines & Crimes
The Machines That Walk At Midnight