Ulrich Gumpert - Quartette

Intakt 127

Pianist Ulrich Gumpert takes a page from the same playbook as the Scandinavian band Atomic in cobbling a collective persona for his new quartet. Both ensembles are the partial product of the players’ voluminous music collections. The disc’s notes detail Gumpert’s daily routine of poring over his library-sized holdings, pulling jazz LPs and cds from the shelves and steeping himself in the aural record from Dixieland to New Thing. Gumpert’s compositions are similarly patch-quilt, skipping over such tenuous style boundaries as swing, bop and free jazz and coming up with a cache of curvy, topsy-turvy tunes that rarely show their seams and pack a potent bite. A few of the selections borrow from the songbook of the Zentralquartett, Gumpert’s better-established outlet on Intakt. Several others reference his band mates in that more venerable venture. Despite correlations in repertoire and ears inclusive of earlier forms, the newer group is definitely its own entity.

Elements of early Cecil peek out in Gumpert’s vigorous pianistics, but there’s a more palpable presence of Andrew Hill in his preference for dark roiling chords and densely parceled clusters. Saxophonist Ben Abarbanel-Wolff reminds me of what Eddie “Lockjaw” Davis might have sounded like had he not been stricken by an allergy to the avant-garde. A similar vibrato-friendly tone and barking, bristling attack inform his lines on tracks like the hard swinging “Vom alten Lager” and “Conference at Luten’s” but he also works convincing ballad magistery on the pastoral “Von Hier und Anderswo”. The latter tune is soaked in romantic brio, but the four don’t appear to be playing the piece for satirical laughs. Michael Grienier comes on like a freer leaning Philly Joe, stamping precision beats with stentorian force but stopping short of distracting bombast. Bassist Jan Roder is adept at filling the harmonic fissures in the dense ensemble passages of pieces such as “Conference at Conny’s” and also willing to take the solitary lead, Jimmy Garrison-style, on the modal title piece, a loose derivation of the Impulse-era esthetic Gumpert holds dear. It also ably demonstrates the pianist’s willingness to leave his colleagues to their own devices, Gumpert adding only sparse comping whilst Abarbanel-Wolff pilots the piece with brawny authority. Recorded in a state-of-the-art Berlin studio in the summer of 2006, the disc also upholds the platinum audio standard that is Intakt’s mandate.

~ Derek Taylor