Randy (Mariano) [6:54]
Waltz for Fee (Gregor Huebner) [8:30]
Three Leaves (Mariano) [7:35]
Plum Island (Mariano) [7:42]
Elm (Beirach) [10:37]
Nardis (Miles Davis) [6:59]
My Foolish Heart (Washington/Young) [5:45]
Rectilinear (Beirach) [5:08]
Beauty (Veit Huebner) [5:47]
Charlie Mariano (alto sax)
Gregor Huebner (violin)
Richie Beirach (piano)
Veit Huebner (bass)
Recorded 9 October, 2004, Stuttgart, Germany.
For a good number of years,
Charlie Mariano has been one of the most open
minded (and open eared) musicians working
within the boundaries of the musical language
generally referred to as jazz. Born in 1923
in Boston, his career began at the very beginning
of the 1940s, playing with local bands in
and around his home town. In the 1950s he
went on to work with bands such as that of
Stan Kenton and with musicians including Dizzy
Gillespie, Charlie Mingus and Shelly Manne
(to name but a few). During the 1960s and
1970s he mainly lived and worked in Europe
and India (where he acquired a competence
on the nagaswaram – a double reed wind instrument).
He played and recorded with jazz-rock musicians
such as Eberhard Weber and Philip Catherine,
Jaspar van't Hof and Jan Hammer. Endlessly
eclectic, but consistently true to himself,
there can surely be few musicians who have
been equally at home, at one time or another,
in the company of Nat Pierce and The Karnataka
College of Percussion, with Jaki Byard, Kenny
Wheeler and Jack Bruce.
This present CD finds Mariano,
a ‘veteran’ by any definition of the term
but far from the least ossification of the
musical imagination, playing alongside the
fine pianist Richie Beirach, classically trained
but a (younger) veteran of jazz groups such
as Lookout Farm (with Dave Liebman) and groups
led by, inter alia, Chet Baker, Stan
Getz and Lee Konitz; also the German violinist
Gregor Huebner, composer and instrumentalist,
whose work is as likely to recall Stuff Smith
or Leroy Jenkins as to echo the Bach sonatas
and partitas for solo violin, and his brother
Veit Huebner, who contributes both some rock-solid
rhythmic bass and some wittily humorous inventions
of his own.
This is a band of eclectics,
a band not confined by traditional ideas of
genre or conventional notions of distinct
musical idioms. Beirach and Gregor Huebner
have often worked together – as, for example,
with George Mraz, on outstanding albums such
as Round About Bartok (ACT 9276-2),
Round About Federico Mompou (ACT 9286-2)
and, my own favourite, Round About Monteverdi
(ACT 941`2-2). Their musical familiarity with
one another contributes to the success of
the present album, on which Beirach plays
with a joyous lucidity and clarity, hard swinging
at times, generating long bop and post-bop
runs across the keyboard and at other times
touchingly meditative and introspective, echoic
of both Bill Evans and, indeed, classical
impressionism. Gregor Huebner plays throughout
with inventive and imaginative wit, though
I am not sure that he fuses jazz and classical
idioms with quite the naturalness and completeness
that Beirach does. Mariano finally steals
the album, playing with intense emotionality,
by turns plangent and humorous, his melodic
lines distinctive alike in their deceptive
simplicity and their unexaggerated passion.
Musically sophisticated and
full of emotional substance, this is an album
which can be warmly recommended to all listeners
who aspire (at least) to the kind of open-mindedness
which has for so long characterised the work
of the remarkable Charlie Mariano.
Glyn Pursglove
CD Reviews
INTUITION INT 3395 2 [65:19]
