Ask Gonzalo

ASK GONZALO make music with one aim: to make people happy. Beautiful and wild, familiar and unsettling, complicated and straightforward - is it still jazz? Indie? Or simply a highly improvisational, undogmatic approach that fuses jazz, dub, krautrock and funk - sometimes danceable, sometimes melancholic, sometimes like the score of a film you can't quite place?

The Berlin quintet is made up of five very different musicians: Armando Carillo Zanuy (trumpet, Spain), a seasoned big-band leader who never loses his cool on stage. Kota Maeda (guitar, Japan) comes from the blues and turns into a guitar dervish live. Peter Herzau (Fender Rhodes, Germany) lays down sonic carpets and builds deconstructive solos guided by the principles of Gestalt psychology. Francisco P. Riccheri (drums, Argentina) plays with a lightness as if he were sitting on a flying carpet. Florian Scheffler (bass, Germany) is the engine holding it all together.

On 1 October 2025 the new album "?!" drops (pronounced 'q and a', as in 'question and answer') - more elaborate, provocative and versatile than the 2023 debut, yet true to the band's own sound. Although ASK GONZALO are an instrumental band, they brought in vocal support for two tracks this time: German-Bosnian singer ZaZa transforms the polka-esque "Flying Stick" into a dancefloor stormer with her smoky voice, and also elevates a track from the previous album into a soundtrack-worthy version (advance single "Lama / Obrada", available digitally from 12 September 2025). The trumpeter's voice can be heard only on the song "Love".