DKQ (Dimitris Kakavoulis Quartet/Quintet) was created by pianist, drummer and composer Dimitris Kakavoulis in 2008. The concept for its music arose from the need to personalise the expressive context of creating improvised music, while relying on both new and existing forms. The sound of the band can be broadly classified as modern jazz, yet the vehicles for arriving at this result can be traced in the standard and modern American repertoire, latin music, traditional Greek music and Mediterranean music.

 

The central concept lies in the absence of any preconceived expressive notions and the uninhibited expression of each individual musician's personality, with the intention of creating a new musical entity that dissolves all parts into a new whole, impossible to predict or force into being. In this way style emerges after the fact, rather than guiding the music from the start.



There were several line-ups for the band in its initial stages, yet a long standing collaboration with Dimitris Kollias (saxophone), Periklis Trivolis (double bass) and Leandros Fratnik (drums) in other projects and contexts, resulted in their being part of the line-up that proved most true to the compositional intentions of D.Kakavoulis and most capable of creating something above and beyond what was on the score paper.

This resulted in the group going into the studio for a single recording session in June 2011 and obtaining their first record, later entitled "Curves" (released in July 2012).

After a few years of pause, the band was re-united in March of 2023 for a live recording in Underflow in Athens, Greece, curated and co-produced by Thinkbabymusic Collective.

A release in digital format of this recording is scheduled for November 2024.