#till bronner

[comporsilencios]

[mostlymonk]

Round Midnight

Till Brönner & die 12 Cellisten der Berliner Philharmoniker

[best-of-contemporary-jazz]

Track: Scream & Shout Album: Nightfall Artist: Till Brönner, Dieter Ilg Year: 2018

[blacknaturall]

[websterml]

Jazz

[comporsilencios]

[flommischen]

[dustedmagazine]

Günter Baby Sommer – Baby’s Party (Intakt)

The calendar date of the first recorded trumpet/drums duo is open to debate, but there’s a strong case to be made for March 21st, 1955. On that fateful day while waiting for a tardy Art Tatum, Roy Eldridge and Alvin Stoller committed three improvisations to studio tape that stand out starkly not only in their discographies, but in the annals of jazz history writ large. Safe money says Günter Baby Sommer and Till Brönner are aware of that antecedent along with a fair share of the other instances in improvised music incorporating that instrumentation since. That presumed familiarity in no way lessens the spontaneity and impact of the music collected on Baby’s Party, a session convened in celebration of Sommer’s 75th birthday.

The German drummer and his countryman Brönner square off on eleven pieces including cleverly slanted covers of “Danny Boy” and Duke Ellington’s “In a Sentimental Mood,” the latter serving as a salutary session sign-off. Sommer’s always been a percussionist first, augmenting his kit with all manner of ethnically-sourced rhythm devices. “Apéro con brio” finds him shifting from sparse cymbal down-strokes to a resonating log drum pattern as Brönner blows pursed phrases in and around the beat. Melodic color as voiced on skins and other surfaces is another integral feature of the drummer’s argot and the first of the standards illustrate his canny capacity for fusing cadenced contours with a clearly delineated theme. Brönner is again a model of restraint and invention, the tensile tension wound between the players both palpable and parsable from moment to moment.

“First Shot”, “Second Shot” and “Third Shot” deal in spontaneously doled textures with Brönner playing a mix of mutes on all three over a quietly abraded clatter on the first while Sommer shapes a boinging Doppler contrast on jaw harp for the next. With the last, malleted tom toms maintain a vaguely African motif as brass does a shucking and shimmying dance. Humorous in title, “A Soft Drink in Between” sounds by turns funereal and anthemic by comparison as the pair milk the natural acoustics of the studio for a wash of echo and sonorous decay. A switch again to log drum and gliding open flugelhorn mid-piece alters the mood dramatically with an almost fantasia-like beauty. Agile about-faces like this are common in the duo’s dialogue and confirmation that as arguably advanced in age as Sommer is, in the end it’s only a number. One is left with the pleasurable presumption that Roy and Alvin would approve.

Derek Taylor