Jazz – Page 15 – musicophilesblog – From Keith Jarrett to Johannes Brahms

Helge Lien’s Badgers and Other Beings – A Scandinavian Trio to Watch

Last week I wrote about Triosence, who recorded their latest album in Norway, at Jan Erik Kongshaug’s legendary Rainbow Studios. The album below is recorded at the same studio, however, unlike the German trio above, they didn’t have a long trip to get there, as they are from Norway.

Helge Lien, before getting relatively well-known with his own trio, was playing with singers like Silje Neergard.

Since 2008 the Helge Lien Trio (with Frode Berg on bass and Per Oddvar Johansen on drums) has released three albums, approximately every three years, Hello Troll (2008), Natsukashii (2011), and Badgers and Other Beings in 2014, all on the excellent Ozella Music label (see also my review of Edgar Knecht from the same label). For the audiophiles among my readers, all are available as high-res downloads and worth it. Note that this is the first time Johansen joins the trio, replacing Knut Aalefjær (who get’s a dedication in the song Knut).

Badgers and Other Beings

I could have chosen to review here any of the three, when I checked my iTunes ratings, all have the same mix of four star tracks with 3-4 five stars on each, and I wouldn’t want to miss any of them in my collection. So let me just take the latest release, which has been in pretty heavy on my system since I bought it just after it came out.

All tracks on this album, as usual with Lien, are his originals, no standards here. Already the starter track is very beautiful, Mor (apparently meaning mother in Norvegian).

The example above shows everything I like about this album, beautiful, complex melodies, and an interaction between the musicians that shows that they’ve been together for a long time and can follow each other blindly, and this in spite of the fact that Johansen is a new addition to the trio.

The following Joe is more uptempo, but keeps the same mood, and is another one of my five star tracks. My other two favorites are The New Black and the final track, Badgers Lullaby, where Johanssen on drums gets featured more prominently, and where time truly stands still, while fully drawing you into this very particular Nordic world.

My rating: 4 stars (but pretty borderline to five, I’m still hesitating whether I should start giving 4.5 stars at some point).

You can download it here (Highresaudio.com) and here (Qobuz) in 24/192 resolution, and at Bandcamp you’ll get a cheaper regular CD resolution download and you can even purchase a limited edition vinyl edition.

Triosence: Turning Points – Delightful Contemporary Trio Jazz from Germany

I’ve written several times before about Jazz piano trios, as this is one of my favorite art forms, be it with Shai Maestro, Keith Jarrett, or Edgar Knecht.

I’ve already mentioned that Europe in the Shai Maestro post that many of today’s Jazz piano trios seem to come from Europe. Germany is one of the hotspots. Don’t ask me why, maybe it is because there are enough Jazz schools around to produce outstanding musicians, but these days, there are quite a number of German trios that deserve to be better known than they are, including Julia Hülsmann, the Tingvall Trio, the already mentioned Edgar Knecht, Michael Wollny’s excellent efforts, etc. etc.

Triosence

Triosence was started by Bernhard Schüler on piano, Stephan Emig on drums and Matthias Nowak on bass, but the latter has been replaced by Ingo Senst. Both Schüler and Emig come from the same German town of Kassel originally, a rather ugly industrial place that has been completely destroyed in the 2nd world war and unfortunately rebuilt with too much cheap concrete. It cannot be this city that has inspired so much beautiful music.

I currently have four of their seven officially released albums including First Enchantment, Away For A While, One Summer Night (Live), and Turning Points, and all of them are highly recommended. I’ll eventually add all of their albums to my collection.

As an example of their production, let me write about their 2013 Sony album “Turning Points”, which happens to be my favorite (but by a very slight margin, as the other are really great as well).

Turning Points (Sony Classical 2013)

It already starts with my favorite track, No One’s Fault.

Why do I like this track so much? Well, it gives me just what I want most: beautiful melodic development. I’m a sucker for melodies. My mind is probably rather simple, I just love melodies. This is probably one of the reasons why atonal classical, free jazz etc are just not my cup of tea, my little brain cannot cope with that freedom. But give me a beautiful melody, as developed here by Schüler, add beautiful bass lines including a lot of use of the bow by Emig, and just the right amount of drums (I personally hate it when drummers overdo it), and I’m in paradise.

My other 5 star tracks on this album are the ballad Your Nearness, the groovy Go For It, and their beautiful interpretation of the Kurt Weill standard Speak Low, where the bass gets to play the melody for a while.

If you do speak German, the 12 min documentary on their website is also worth checking out, explaining how on purpose they went to Norway to record this album: http://www.triosence.com/alben/turning-points/

My rating: 5 stars (well somewhere between 4-5 stars actually, but I love some of the 5 star tracks enough to put the balance towards the top rating)

You can find it here (Qobuz).

Aaron Diehl’s Space, Time, Continuum – Another Young Piano Grandmaster to Watch

These days from my admittedly biased European perspective you could say that all new great Jazz is coming out of Europe these days, especially in the Jazz piano trio space, basically since Esbjörn Svensson brought this art form into the 2000s, taking over a great legacy dating back to Bill Evans and Keith Jarrett.

This is rubbish admittedly, although I have quite a number of posts in the making (at least in my head) about great artists like Triosence, Giovanni Mirabassi, the Tingvall Trio, Tord Gustavsen, etc., all from Old Europe.

But obviously already Shai Mastro I mentioned last week is from Israel, and the birthplace of Jazz is still an absolute Jazz hotspot, and I’m jealous of anybody living in NYC for their live scene.

Aaron Diehl

Diehl really is an extraordinary talent. His first non-live album, The Bespoke Man’s Narrative (2013) was already eye-opening, and he certainly is respond for a large part in the appeal that Cecile McLorin Salvant’s debut album Woman Child had on me and many others (the album got a Grammy award nomination).

This guy, born in 1985 in Ohio, is still very young, only two years older than Shai Maestro I recently mentioned. I expect this guy to have a great career, and be part, if needed, of the living proof that Jazz is not dead, but clearly very much alive (unfortunately in too much of a niche habitat).

Space, Time, Continuum

Nice title, first of all. It really illustrates the relevance of punctuation.

Side note, can an album that has a track called Flux Capacitor be bad? (I assume I’ve just given away my age. If you have no idea what a flux capacitor is, think Doc Brown and DeLorean, if that still doesn’t ring a bell, well, you missed an entire decade and will just have to google it yourself).

Diehl plays here with his regular trio of David Wong and Quincy Davis, but this isn’t, except for some selected tracks, a trio album. They are joined, in various permutations, by Bennie Golson, Joe Temperley, Stephen Riley, (sax all of them) and Bruce Harris (on trumpet).

But no matter how many horns you add, the star remains Diehl. He is always present, and very nicely so. What is so special about him, is probably his touch, it always sounds easy and relaxed, no matter how complex the material gets.

On the last track, we even get a guest appearance of Cecile McLorin Salvant. Well, she’s always welcome to pop up anywhere as far as I concerned, she is truly very special. I’m looking forward to her soon to be released new album.
My rating: 4 stars, very enjoyable throughout.

You can get it here or here as downloads..

Cassandra Wilson: Coming Forth by Day – Lady Day Meets Nick Cave

Billie Holiday

Tribute albums are really hot again these days, see for example Autour de Nina (praised here), or Nina Revisited (not very positively reviewed here), focusing on Nina Simone.

Billie Holiday is another Jazz legend that gets her share of tribute albums (José James, Carmen McRae, even Tony Bennett, just to name a few).

I have to admit something here, as much as I admire Billie, I don’t listen to her very often, as her early albums where her voice was still fully developed are usually poorly recorded, and the late albums that have a decent sound quality show her beyond her peak.

Cassandra Wilson

Cassandra Wilson has always been a Jazz singer that was never afraid of getting close to pop music; actually, I’m not a universal fan of her because of that.

In any case, her last album, Another Country, I really liked (with the exception of the awkward O Sole Mio), so I was really looking forward to her new 2015 release.

Coming Forth By Day

Coming Forth by Day is, as mentioned above, a tribute album to Billie Holiday, and it was released very timely on Lady Day‘s 100th birthday.

The tracks include well-known standards like Don’t Explain, Strange Fruit, and You Go To My Head. However, you’ll be surprised when you hear them here how different they sound.

The key difference is the production. Nick Launey, better known for working with Nick Cave, is responsible for the arrangements. T-Bone Burnett, who ruined (to my ears) the Diana Krall album Glad Rag Doll, is limited to playing the guitar, so he doesn’t do too much damage.

In summary, you get Bille Holiday Meets Nick Cave, with Wilson’s absolutely unmistakable voice. Is it worth getting? Not across the board, but some tracks are good enough to justify the purchase. I’d personally pick Don’t Explain, You Go To My Head, and Strange Fruit for that honor. Ah, and Good Morning Heartache is a bit weird, but needs a special mention.

Unfortunately, unlike some earlier albums, this album isn’t particularly “audiophile”, as a bit overproduced and compressed. But in a way, that goes well with the overall ambiance.

So listen before you buy, but it is certainly worth checking out.

Overall rating (in spite of some annoying tracks): 4 stars

Shai Maestro – This Avishai Cohen Alumni Will Go Places

Avishai Cohen

You cannot write about Israeli Jazz without mentioning Avishai. This bass player from Jerusalem probably is the most prominent Israeli Jazz musician, after being “discovered” by nobody less than Chick Corea back in 1996. Personally, unfortunately, I’m not such a big fan of his albums, there are some individual tracks that I really like, but there isn’t a single album I really love throughout.

Shai Maestro

Luckily, he in turn discovered Shai Maestro, when needing a piano player, and he hired him pretty much directly out of school apparently. Talk about risk-taking, but well done! You’ll hear Maestro playing the piano on Gently Disturbed, Sensitive Hours, Seven Seas, and Aurora. During this time, Maestro relocated to New York City, probably a smart choice for a Jazz musician.

Then, in 2011, at the tender age of 24, Shai Maestro decided he wanted to launch his own trio, together with Jorge Roeder (from Peru) on bass and Ziz Ravitz (Israel) on drums, and they launched their first album, simply called Shai Maestro Trio, in early 2012, on the French label Laborie Jazz.

I had heard Shai Maestro shortly after that on his first European tour, and fell in love with the music immediately. From what I could see during the concert, the guy is not only abrillant musician, but also very modest and humble

Since the debut album (pictured above), Maestro has recorded two more albums, The Road To Ithaca and Untold Stories (the latter including some live tracks), both are very good, but his debut still is my favorite album.

There is just such a beautiful mixture of evolving melodies, some Middle-Eastern influences, and a great understanding of the piano trio tradition (legend has it Shai discoverd Jazz at the age of 8 with an Oscar Peterson album), that you just don’t stop listening to this beautiful album.

And if you get the chance to see him live, go for it. The handful of live tracks on Untold Stories gives you some idea on what to expect, but the additional time and freedom the trio has live just creates something very very beautiful. They really interact as if they’d been together for decades.

This is one of the few musicians where I’ll safely buy any future album blindly. He’s only 28 now, so we’ll hopefully be enjoying many more albums in the future.

My rating: 5 stars (yes I know, I keep giving 5 stars quite often recently, but it is just so much more fun writing about the truly outstanding albums).

You can download it here.

Edgar Knecht – Dance On Deep Waters – Transforming Traditional Songs into Jazz

To me, Jazz Piano Trio is just an outstanding art form, as already discussed on my previous post on Keith Jarrett’s’ Standards vol. 2.

Actually, Standards fits nicely into a number of trios/albums that have shaped and influenced this particular art form. You could start this lineage with Bill Evans first trio, then move on to Keith Jarrett’s Standards trio, and somehow the third level of evolution came with the late Esbjörn Svensson and his trio. He clearly innovated the trio on many fronts.

Many of today’s piano trios would be unthinkable without EST. And we are very lucky that this art form is not only still alive, but thriving.

About 18 month ago I started a thread on another forum on that topic, called “Are we living in the Golden Age of the Jazz Piano trio?“. This thread has now answered the question I was asking with more than 300 posts today and has become an amazing (if unsorted) list documenting how much is happening around us right now!

Edgar Knecht

I want to start writing about some of the artists I mentioned or discovered on this thread. Let me kick this off with my most recent purchase, the 2013 album Dance On Deep Waters from the German Edgar Knecht, on Ozella Music. I actually start with a tricky example, this trio is actually a quartet as it includes a percussionist. But well, it is close enough.

As you can see from the thread, I was actually introduced to this artists (and many other discoveries) by the forum member Elvergunn, who seems to be even more obsessed than me in finding new artists.

(Little side note: The internet is really such a great place for music, you can exchange with music lovers in the entire world, you find stuff that you would have never found in your local record store, and you can all download it in minutes to your computer thanks to the rapidly multiplying specialized online shops, but let’s close the parenthesis here).

Edgar Knecht in my mind is all about melodies and creating a very particular atmosphere. He takes simple music, from German folk songs to even Brahms famous Lullaby “Wiegenlied” and transforms it into something very special. The only little issue I have with this album is that sometimes you’d like a little bit more diversity in terms of approach and style. But I suppose you can’t have it all.

That said, I find this album very enjoyable and keep going back to it quite regularly right now.
My rating: 4 stars

You can get it here as download and here as CD.

Keith Jarrett’s My Song – I Really Shouldn’t Be Liking This Album

Keith Jarrett again

Time for another post on Keith Jarrett, given that he prominently figures in my blog’s subtitle. I’ve also mentioned My Song is my recent Songs That Give Me Goose Bumps post .

Jarrett is obviously one of the most brilliant artists in the Jazz world. So why do I say I shouldn’t like this album? Well, two things: a) I love most of Jarrett’s solo albums from the 1970s (the obvious Köln Concert, the Sun Bear Concerts, Bremen/Lausanne), but I find his regular 1970s Jazz albums, very much hit and miss to my taste (with significantly more misses than hits). This is not a particular Keith Jarrett problem, but more my personal problem with the 1970 Jazz scene overall.

Furthermore, I’m not a big fan of Jan Garbarek . Most of the albums I’ve heard of him leave me rather cold and slightly bored. No judgment implied here, just personal taste. (A notable exception is the recently released 2009 Dresden live recording).

My Song

So how come this 1977 album is among my absolute all-time favorites? Well, to be fair, one thing that plays in its favor is the fact that this was my first ever Jazz album. Before buying this at the age of 18 or so, Jazz was weird people playing weird music in my mind.

And then I heard this album: amazingly beautiful melodies, very simple and straightforward arrangements. I couldn’t really believe this was what Jazz was all about. So I copied the vinyl on compact cassette (quick history lesson for my younger readers, google it for your general education, this is what MP3s used to look like) and played it in the car radio over and over and over.

Usually, with stuff I used to listen to a lot during my youth I’ve outgrown it by now. Not this album though. There is a timeless beauty in the melodies. All original compositions by Keith by the way.

My preferred song is the eponymous title song, which is one of my preferred melodies of all times (you can hear the crowd cheering when Jarrett plays this as an encore on the Carnegie Hall solo concert, see also the above mentioned post for a Youtube clip).

The other favorite is the relatively short Country, where Jarrett introduces the theme, before Garbarek get’s to take it over. The rest of the album is very nice as well, with the exception of the slightly random (to my ears) Mandala. All the rest, after all these years, I can still listen to over and over and over again. A rare achievement.

My rating: 5 stars

If you want to buy it, the recent 2015 remaster available in 24/96 and 24/192 is of astounding quality. It’s rather expensive, but you could never guess listening to it that this recording is nearly 40 years old. This was originally recorded and mastered in Oslo by Jan Erik Kongshaug, a true recording magician.

You can find it here and here.

Badgers and Other Beings

Share with

Triosence

Turning Points (Sony Classical 2013)

Share with

Aaron Diehl

Space, Time, Continuum

Share with

Billie Holiday

Cassandra Wilson

Coming Forth By Day

Share with

Avishai Cohen

Shai Maestro

Share with

Share with

Keith Jarrett again

Share with