Dieter Scherf - Inside-Outside Reflections

Atavistic/UMS 255

In the heyday of German free improvisation, as in the United States, the music had its epicenters even as it carried on in a creative-guerilla fashion throughout the country. Though a significant amount of activity occurred (and still does) in Berlin and Munich, and these seem to get the most press by virtue of Free Music Production and the Berlin Jazzfest, Frankfurt was the locale of one of Germany’s major (and most forward-thinking) jazz festivals in the 1960s and ‘70s, and its suburbs the breeding-ground for two of the most interesting collective ensembles in (then West) Germany’s improvisational halcyon: the Modern Jazz Quintet Karlsruhe (featuring trumpeter Herbert Joos), and the Free Jazz Group Wiesbaden (Scherf’s alma mater). Somewhat tellingly, neither band recorded for any of the music’s normal channels – FMP, ECM, Japo, or Calig – choosing instead to release their music on private imprints in small, artful runs whose distribution relegated them to footnotes of German jazz history.

The Free Jazz Group Wiesbaden, a quartet with the odd instrumentation of reeds (Scherf), trumpet (Michael Sell), guitar (Gerhard König, who also played flute) and percussion (Wolfgang Schlick), released two appropriately schizoid LPs on Scherf’s LST label in 1969 and 1971 (Frictions and Frictions Now, catalog numbers corresponding to the dates recorded) before disbanding. Scherf continued working and recording for at least the next few years, producing Interaction in 1973 with three similarly obscure characters (though drummer Mano Weiss had worked with Joos), a somewhat typical free blowing date excepting a tour-de-force of overdubbed percussion and reeds, the oddly-titled “Folk Rock.” Interaction is probably more notable for its cover, an Uwe Zimmerman classic featuring a melting, screaming head, than the music contained therein. Inside-Outside Reflections, Scherf’s fourth and final appearance on LST is the more interesting of his two as a leader, a turn of the ‘power trio’ format on its head, joining the reedman with Aachen-born drummer Paul Lovens and the wonderful Polish bassist Jacek Bednarek for six pieces recorded both live and in the studio late in 1974.

The set opens with the title track’s circular-breath clarinet over rustling percussion and Bednarek’s weighty lines (see “Atemzirkulation” for more of Scherf’s circular talent), Lovens getting a brief solo before bass and bass clarinet enter at an ominous slow wail to take it out. “Daijededa” features Scherf in Roland Kirk-mode, deftly tripling alto, baritone and bass clarinet before one of his thoroughly bop-schooled alto flights emerges, a gritty and keening extrapolation of Konitz that makes the choice of Lovens all the more curious. Scherf switches back and forth between tortured bebop and a manic, acid bass clarinet technique, in a way giving the lie to the album title’s implications far more than the opener. Lovens’ “Drum und Dran” dances with fractured rhythm as Scherf and Bednarek occasionally inject burnished lyricism into the proceedings, a see-saw of mania and placidity that is more than a two-way mirror. “Prozess” is a live recording from the Jazz House Wiesbaden, and despite its ‘blowing-session’ nature, is probably the centerpiece of the record – two stunningly scorching alto solos, the first of which would make Arthur Jones proud, though Bednarek is probably given center stage as the one most able to gird the often disparate proceedings. Closing out the session is “Klänge über Linie,” Scherf providing a repetitive piano rustle over which Bednarek gives a vicious arco workout in tandem with Lovens’ dissociative surges, a tense end to a tensile set.

Inside-Outside Reflections is among what the best of the Unheard Music Series has to offer – namely, through a single release, providing a window into an area of free music that few people would otherwise have the chance to experience. Though Scherf will be far from a household name in even the hippest of households, the re-release of this music is truly a welcome one. Unfortunately, though the CD edition provides interesting photos of Scherf and a comrade in their broken-down tour VW van (evidently they ‘jam econo’), the lack of liner notes makes context a bit daunting. It isn’t too much to hope for that the next UMS nugget alleviates this potential problem.

~ Clifford Allen

Posted by clifford on December 19, 2005 4:54 PM