Pianist Julia Hülsmann and singer Theo Bleckmann, in a first – and long-awaited - collaborative recording, celebrate the “unsung Weill” alongside the master’s best-loved works including “Mack The Knife”, “Speak Low” and “September Song”, adding also Julia’s settings of Walt Whitman, with whom Kurt Weill felt an affinity. The project came together at the instigation of the Kurt Weill Festival in Dessau in 2013 and since then has gained new life on the road and been fine-tuned in this studio recording made in Oslo in June 2014 with Manfred Eicher as producer. It marks a musical advance for the Hülsmann group at a number of levels, and these recastings of Weill open up new imaginative possibilities for the players. English trumpeter and flugelhornist Tom Arthurs, who made his debut with Hülsmann on In Full View is fully integrated on A Clear Midnight. Often his trumpet doubles or underpins Bleckmann’s singing, giving a new colour to the vocals. As for Theo Bleckmann, this is the sensitive vocalist’s first ECM appearance as jazz singer, although he has recorded twice for the label as a member of the Meredith Monk ensemble on “Mercy” and “Impermanence”.
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Savina Yannatou’s fourth ECM album is a dazzling evocation of her band’s hometown, plunging deep into its rich and complex history. Once known colloquially as the Jerusalem of the Balkans, Thesssaloniki has been home to a host of cultures, religions and ethnic communities. Greeks, Jews, Turks, Bulgarians, Serbs, Armenians, Slavo-Macedonians and Pontiac Greeks have shared the city’s diverse life. Yannatou gives all of them a voice, even casting an Irish song about Salonika into this multi-lingual programme, in which she shines as a unique interpreter and spokeswoman for the city’s ghosts. As ever, Primavera en Salonico are a delight, one of the most resourceful bands of any idiom, as they negotiate the inspired – and very varied - arrangements of Kostas Vomvolos.
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Anders Jormin: Trees of Light
Anders Jormin’s new Swedish-Japanese project returns the highly distinctive voice and fiddle of Lena Willemark to ECM (her first appearance on the label in more than a decade), and introduces koto player Karin Nakagawa. In their collaborative music the J apanese classical tradition and the stark, archaic sounds of the koto, allied to Jormin’s muscular bass improvisations, form a unique context for Lena’s sung poems, delivered in her native Älvdals-dialect. Traditions and non-idiomatic improvising are cross-referenced, and new paths are opened up. This unusual and striking album of deep-rooted contemporary music is launched with ten concerts in Sweden.
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