Ask Gonzalo

ASK GONZALO make music with one ambition: to make people happy. Beautiful and wild. Familiar and unsettling. Complicated and straightforward. Refined instrumentalists and virtuoso show-offs. Jazz. Though - is it still jazz? Or indie? Or both? Or simply a highly improvisational, undogmatic approach that fuses jazz, dub, krautrock and funk into something all its own. Sometimes danceable, sometimes melancholic, sometimes like a film score, sometimes like drifting into the weightlessness of outer space.

Who are they? Spaniard Armando Carillo Zanuy can do anything on the trumpet and, as a seasoned big-band leader, stays unflappable no matter what. Kota Maeda comes from Japan - and from the blues. Quiet at rehearsals, a guitar dervish on stage. Peter Herzau listens, lays down sonic carpets on his Fender Rhodes, and builds his deconstructive solos along the principles of Gestalt psychology. Francisco P. Riccheri from Argentina is the young wild one, drumming with such ease you'd think he was sitting on a flying carpet. Florian Scheffler, like Peter Herzau a German, is the musical all-rounder - the engine that makes projects like this and those driving basslines possible.

"?!" (spoken 'q and a' as in 'question and answer') is the title of ASK GONZALO's new album, released on 1 October 2025. More elaborate, provocative and wide-ranging than their 2023 debut, the band still stays true to its sound - a sound shaped by five very different musicians from Germany, Spain, Argentina and Japan. Five musicians who breathed together and let dissonance and friction happen without calculation, so that harmonic beauty could shine all the brighter in the next moment. The Berlin quintet clearly relishes playing jazz, rock and funk with and against each other.