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Die
Enttaüschung
Die Enttaüschung
INTAKT 125
★★★★ 1 /2
What’s the best jazz
combo today An
elder statesman’s allstar
band Some
recent hotshot conservatory
grads A mid-career hero’s touring
group For my money, none of the above.
Instead, an unassuming, mildly self-abnegating
foursome from Berlin is the heaviest working
band in small-group jazz.
Die Enttaüschung—a name that invites its
own comments (and deflates any grand selfassertion
like the above), translated as “the disappointment”—has
been around since the end of
the ’90s. The group initially limited its releases
to vinyl (a double-LP on Two Nineteen and a
great limited-edition single LP on Crouton). It
released its debut CD on Grob in ’02, and this is
its second digital issuance. Where the others
sported plenty of Thelonious Monk covers, and
Monk’s eccentric structural genius remains a
clear influence, this stellar studio disc offers
nothing but original music.
Playing intimate quartet music firmly rooted
in free-bop, with an open sound, melodic improvising
and a clear delight in swinging (and interrupting
the swing), the group’s frontline is
immediately arresting, a gush of musicality.
Gangly, towering bass clarinetist Rudi Mahall is
a visual mismatch for the diminutive trumpeter
Axel Dörner, but when they dart and swoop
together, trading ideas and sparring and lifting
each other to another level, their compatibility is
beyond question.
Mahall is a monster. With Eric Dolphy’s
sound (sometimes close to the master’s gulping
bottom end) and Ornette Coleman’s
phraseology, he’s a child of the ’60s,
but he’s also an accomplished free
improviser. You can hear how that
expands his options. His soloing is
irrepressible, and there’s nary a lull
in the action across the entire disc.
Dörner, well-known for having
overhauled the trumpet vocabulary
in improvised music, deftly shows
the lyrical side of his playing, infrequently
turning to sound-texture, extended tech
or unvoiced breath. He can conjure past figures,
from Cootie Williams to Tony Fruscella, but his
bright, beautiful sound is personal and he’s
intensely inventive on the reduced harmonies.
The tunes have a Monkish angularity, but the
sound is uniquely Die Enttäuschung. On
“Vorwärts–Rückwärts” (played twice), the simpatico
rhythm section of bassist Jan Roder and
drummer Uli Jennessen speed up and slow
down with hilarious results. Humor is a key part
of the group’s m.o.: take the dopey, near-bossa
“Drive It Down On The Piano,” by Jennessen.
Also, any kitsch is burned up in the heat of the
improvising, as on the drummer’s equally tropical
“Very Goode.” The tunes aren’t ends in
themselves, though. The band takes the good old
idea that charts are springboards for playing, for
music that is not on the page. There’s an absence
of rigidity, serious listening, a playful attitude,
humility and musical ambition, all rolled into
one. No disappointment, at any level.
—John Corbett
Die Enttaüschung: Drie-Null; Arnie & Randy; Vorwärts–
Rückwärts; Drive It Down On The Piano; Resterampe; Klammer
3; Vorwärts–Rückwärts; Oben Mit; Viaduct; Very Goode; Wer
Kommt Mehr Vom ALG; Silke; Selbstkritik Nr. 4; Silverstone
Sparkle Goldfinger; Foreground Behind; 4/45; Mademoiselle
Vauteck. (67:04)
Personnel: Rudi Mahall, bass clarinet; Axel Dörner, trumpet;
Jan Roder, bass; Uli Jennessen, drums.
Ordering info: intaktrec.ch
»
Todd Sickafoose
Tiny Resistors
CRYPTOGRAMOPHONE 138
★★★ 1 /2
When I first saw Todd Sickafoose’s Blood
Orange group a couple years ago, I was puzzled
about where all the sound was coming
from. The five-piece outfit swaggered like a little
big band, sending a scad of intersecting
lines into the air to make a series of thickly
braided flourishes. Evidently, that’s a signature
trait of Sickafoose the composer-arranger,
because the medium-sized ensemble that creates
the music on Tiny Resistors can claim a
similar victory.
For a guy smitten with elaboration, the New
York bassist builds his oft-genial, mildly exotic
and somewhat dreamy tunes from simple
melodies that state themselves and then multiply
into little labyrinths. I occasionally hear it
as a blend of the late-period Lounge Lizards
and Greg Osby’s Sound Theatre. John Lurie
and the M-Base gang milked orchestral ideas
from intricate cross-hatches, and Sickafoose
Guillermo
Klein/Los
Guachos
Filtros
SUNNYSIDE 1177
★★★★
Unaffected by the critical
hoopla that rose
around Argentine
composer, singer and
pianist Guillermo
Klein in New York in
the 1990s, I found his
early CDs monotonous and watery, though Una
Nave (2005) was an improvement. Filtros dramatically
extends the upward trend, particularly
in terms of concision, dramatic arc and focus.
Klein, who now lives in Barcelona, is a complete
original. Though he uses jazz improvisers,
he draws from the layered, run-on repetitions of
minimalism, Argentine folk
tunes (especially rhythms)
and dense modern classical
harmony as much as he does
jazz. He also writes poetic,
probing lyrics and sings them
in a smoky lower register
(using the soft, Argentine
“zhh” on the Spanish “ll”).
His passionate croon recalls
Caetano Veloso.
Like the minimalists,
Klein appears obsessively
concerned with how we
experience musical time, combining the idea of
clave with staggered phrasing. His meters often
give the illusion of arrhythmia—skipping a
beat—and he uses a device he calls “filters”
(hence the name of the album), which makes
you think time slows down or speeds up. (Count
Basie did this, too, in a different way.) His
orchestrations are sometimes turgid, but, overall,
this album—atmospheric, haunting, hypnotic
and cinematic—is like an emotional magnetic
field. Listening, you feel as if something were
tugging hard from below the music, drawing
you in.
“Amor Profundo” is a deeply affecting track,
and hard to get out of your head. With an assist
from female vocalist Carmen Candelo, Klein
declaims—“A-mor/pro-fun-do”—again and
again in descending half-steps, using a form he
says he got from Bach’s “Fugue X” of the “The
Well-Tempered Clavier.” “Volante,” with a
haunting lyric about jumping into a cab to get
out of the rain, features a soaring alto saxophone
solo by Miguel Zenón. The keening sax man
shines again on “Vaca,” playing staggered lines
with trumpeter Diego Urcola on a child-like
melody with rocking-horse rhythms and a lickety-split
section interpolated from Györgi Ligeti.
Chris Cheek, on baritone saxophone, joins
74 DOWNBEAT September 2008